DAVID GARETH: Welcome
to the National Gallery.
My name's David Gareth.
I'm a senior lecturer here.
So today, I want to talk
about minimalism and post
minimalism.
And, to a certain extent,
we'll be talking
about conceptual art,
because it's really
hard to separate minimalism
and conceptual art.
So it all kind of goes together.
And something about minimalism
that I always say is that, never
have things that look so simple
been so complicated.
Minimalism is filled
with theory, and it's filled
with approaches to art that are
philosophical.
Minimalist artists are,
in many ways, philosophers,
engineers, architects,
more than they are painters
or even sculptors.
So there is a lot to unpack,
as people like to say when
trying to understand
the ideas of minimalism.
But I'll try to keep it
relatively simple.
Let's start with what I like
to start with--
what I'm speaking here
at the National Gallery
about minimalism,
and that is to say,
let's start with the obvious,
and with the fact that is hiding
in plain sight
here at the National Gallery,
and that is that the greatest
minimalist work of art
at the National Gallery
is the East Building itself,
as a piece of architecture.
So that building, even though we
don't consider I. M. Pei To be
quote, unquote, "minimalist,"
the East Building is a testament
to minimalist ideas,
and aesthetics, and philosophy.
And I'm going to spend some time
talking about that as we go
through.
So here is the East Building,
and here is the tag
now, the little plaque that
tells us about minimal,
post-minimal, and conceptual art
up in the upper levels
of the gallery.
Let's just mention-- somewhat
like we did with pop art where
we had that list of things that
Richard Hamilton thought defined
pop art--
I have sort of a similar list
of my own, for minimalism, just
certain ideas and concepts
that you can get in your head,
and have them in your head.
And then you can see how they
can apply
to various and sundry works.
So what does minimalism
encompass?
What does it display?
What kind of aspects
does it have, concepts?
These are in no order,
but I would say it relates
to pattern, certain patterns
that are followed.
It relates to seriality,
a series of things-- you start
with something
and have a sort of a series.
Both of those
relate to repetition.
It has rhythm and repetition.
It certainly relates
to mathematical structures.
These are artists very concerned
with math.
And to that extent,
it relates almost always
to geometrical forms,
talking again specifically
about minimalism, not so
much post-minimalism.
Then it relates to industrial
or mass produced materials.
It relates to the idea
of Gestalt thinking.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, Gestalt comes to us
from psychology.
And in the realm of minimalism,
what it simply kind of relates
to is that the parts going up
to making up a whole.
And when you look
at a minimalist sculpture,
you're aware of a Gestalt.
There's an overriding
organization that you're
aware of, and that supersedes
any individual, sort of, part.
So Gestalt thinking is very
important to the minimalists.
It relates to sequence.
That relates to repetition,
certainly.
It tends to be modular.
It has parts,
but again, the parts
go into making up
a cohesive whole.
It has neutrality of meaning.
It's not about how I feel today.
It's not about angst,
it's not about the Second World
War, it's not about consumerism,
it's not about Crackerjacks.
It's just there.
The meaning is neutral.
To that extent, there is no ego
involved.
The artist is not trying to say,
here I am, that box is me, no.
And to that extent,
there's no ego and there's
no touch.
The sense of an artist's touch,
that I've manipulated a surface,
I've painted something,
I've sculpted something,
I've carved something,
I scratched something,
does not exist.
It is non-representational.
It is not supposed to-- you may
think it looks like a house,
but it's not a house.
It's not a house,
it's not a cow, it's not a barn,
it's not a dog,
it's not a crucifixion.
It's nothing except what it is.
It is a-historical,
couldn't care less
about history.
I'm not making a comment
on what's happened in the past,
what might happen in the future,
this, that, or the other thing.
It's a-historical It is--
these terms maybe
go altogether-- it's holistic,
essential, self-referential,
and self-definitional.
Everything refers to what
the thing is, itself.
Doesn't go out, it just stays
right in.
So it is holistic.
Everything is there that you
need.
It is essential,
that's the essential thing.
There's nothing else you should
be waiting for.
It's self-referential.
It refers to itself.
And in a similar way,
it's self-definitional.
It defines itself, so,
all of that.
It's anti figurative,
it's anti-anthropomorphic.
It's not supposed to resemble--
just because it's vertical,
that's not supposed to be
a human body or an idea
of a human body.
So it's nothing like that.
It is anti-illusionistic.
It's not trying to fool us
into thinking that this material
is something that it's not,
that somehow I am creating
an illusionistic space
of perspective that's going
to fool you, no.
It is concept driven,
and this is where it relates
directly to conceptual art,
obviously, because the most
important thing in minimalism,
very often, is the idea
the artist has, initially,
in his head.
I kind of see a lot of boxes
in my head.
And I think, if I were to string
them together and do this,
that, the other thing,
and each one
was separated by nine inches,
that would be interesting.
Done.
Now I just have to find some guy
who could fabricate that.
So here's my instructions.
Could you go ahead and make nine
boxes out of aluminum,
stack them nine inches apart,
put them up on a wall?
I can go home.
So it is concept driven.
The execution is secondary.
This is not about process.
Post-minimalism has a process
aspect to it,
but not minimalism.
One great sculptor
of minimalism-- and also
he transitions
into post-minimalism--
is Robert Morris.
And Morris defines sculpture as,
quote, "scale, proportion,
shape, mass,"
and that those four elements
should create what he called
"strong Gestalt sensations."
And as I said, Gestalts are
patterns or configurations
in which the whole has
a significance that is greater
than and different
from, in fact, any of the parts
that we might consider
individually.
Now, the National Gallery East
Building is a wonderful example
of many of these ideas.
And I'm not saying, at all,
that I. M. Pei was a minimalist.
In fact, he wasn't even much
of a theorist,
in terms of architecture,
unlike some architects who
really are into theory.
Pei was-- is, he's still alive--
is not that way,
but he is certainly sensitive
and comes of age, in New York,
during the time of minimalism,
when he's a young architect.
And so I think these ideas are
relevant.
But they are relevant in a lot
of interesting ways.
So you're going to have to, sort
of, stay with me here,
because we're going to start
with something you might not
consider part of minimalism.
So we're going to start
with this.
This is an ink drawing, an ink
painting by [INAUDIBLE], who
is a Japanese artist
from the 18th century.
He dies in 1837.
He was a Japanese monk.
He was part of what was known
as the Rinzai School, which was
one of the three major Zen
Buddhist schools in Japan.
He was a very famous teacher
and a very famous writer.
And he was known for these Sumi
paintings, ink paintings
that you see here.
He spent his life near Yokohama,
the first part of his life.
But then at the age of 39,
he secluded himself
in a monastery, in a zen temple
in Japan.
And he spent the rest
of his life in this temple.
And he wrote and preached
and spoke about various
zen-related--
zen teachings.
You can read his things
[? today. ?] And he was kind
of light hearted.
He wasn't a real ponderous
person, so his thought
and his ideas-- many people
found his ideas very accessible
because of that.
And as a result, he started,
historically--
even centuries after his death,
into the 20th century--
he sort of
had an international following
of, especially, artists,
philosophers, theologians, et
cetera.
Now he created this drawing,
and what it is is a circle,
triangle, square,
not necessarily in that order.
And this was his picture
of the universe, these three
elements, the square, triangle,
and circle.
The circle represented
the infinite in his teaching--
the infinite is the basis
of all things--
but the infinite is, itself,
as he would say, formless.
It has no particular form.
But we, as humans, endow that
with some kind of meaning
or shape.
So we endow the infinite
with some kind of--
through our senses--
with some kind of tangible form,
is what he would say.
And that tangible form is--
in which we try to take
the infinite of the circle
and give it some meaning
or form-- is the triangle.
So from the circle,
we go to the triangle.
That's the beginning
of all form.
You take the circle,
and then you begin to create
a form from it.
And out of the triangle--
of course,
if you put two triangles
together, you get the square.
So these three things
are inextricably linked.
A square is essentially
a triangle, doubled,
and then you can continue
to double the process
and replicate the process
to infinity, right?
OK, so once you do that,
this is what he would call
the 10,000 Things.
And that is the universe, OK?
So, have I lost you all?
I'm not going to ask you
to climb up any mountains.
OK, so this is 18th century.
It's part of a zen philosophy
by a very important zen
philosopher.
And his ideas become
well-known-- he's still very
popular today--
so then we go to this.
So this is a drawing on the left
by Sol LeWitt, and the title
of the drawing
is All Double Combinations
Superimposed of Six
Geometric Figures, Circle,
Square, Triangle, Rectangle,
Trapezoid, and Parallelogram.
That's the title.
So I'll just read the title
again-- not that you need
to copy it down--
All Double Combinations
Superimposed of Six
Geometric Figures, Circle,
Square, Triangle, Rectangle,
Trapezoid, and Parallelogram.
And that drawing dates to 1977.
And he produced it, repeatedly,
as a print.
That's very non-zen, whatever--
I'm expecting Woody Woodpecker
to come out.
And that brings us back
to Earth.
So Sol LeWitt on the left,
on the right is a work by Walter
di Maria.
And it is titled, as you might
think, Left to Right Triangle
Circle Square.
It's from 1972
and it's a brushed,
stainless steel triangle,
circle, square.
And these are channels.
So they each have a little metal
ball, as well, in them.
So LeWitt and Walter Di Maria,
among other--
now Sol LeWitt we consider
a conceptual artist,
but of course he didn't
intimately tie to minimalism.
So again, these distinctions
are, in some ways,
not even relevant.
And certainly, Walter Di Maria--
you may know his later work,
the more environmental work,
like Lightning Feel,
you know that one, and all
that stuff.
He becomes a more
environmental artist,
along with Robert Smithson
and people like that.
But this idea of the circle,
the square, or the triangle,
and the seriality of all
of this, when things are
repeated to create a system,
was very influential on Sol
LeWitt.
He thought art should be
systemic, it should have sort
of a system.
That's certainly
true with Walter Di Maria.
And they were all sort of
devoted to the idea
that the system should be based
on pure geometric forms,
and that they were, much
like what [? Gibon ?] would say,
these were the portals
or the symbols,
the representation
of universal, cosmic sorts
of ideas.
The reason these works
have the little ball, which can
roll around,
that's to shake up the universe.
So when you get too meditative,
the ball rolls around and then
you kind of are shocked back
to your senses, that idea.
So here is the Walter Di Maria.
The '60s in America were a time
of--
there was lots of discussion
about spirituality,
transcendentalism, all of that.
Many Americans were certainly
influenced by Asian teachings--
Chinese, Japanese-- thought they
were especially attuned.
And many New York artists were--
we've talked about Jung
and Freud
for the abstract
expressionists-- but certainly
many were attuned to, just,
the idea of zen-inspired art
forms based
on these perfect sorts
of shapes.
And there was one philosopher
who came to New York City
and taught at Columbia, who was
the master of this discussion.
And that was Suzuki.
D. T. Suzuki taught at Columbia,
in New York.
And Suzuki was one
of the great zen philosophers.
He taught at Columbia,
and many, many artists, if they
didn't literally sit in
on his classes,
they were reading what he was
writing at this time in New
York.
He was very
influential in disseminating
these ideas to New York artists
and writers
from his position at Columbia.
And so you start to see
these ideas infiltrate, as we've
just talked about,
into the works
of these various painters.
These works overlap a bit, here,
because of course they are
speaking of transformation,
and sort of seriality, that one
thing will become another thing,
will become another thing.
Now having said that--
and I'm keeping this relatively
simple, because otherwise
we'll have two hours just
on zen--
let's look at I. M. Pei.
So these are three sets
of drawings by I. M. Pei,
for various buildings.
And you can see them labeled
here, although it's
hard to read.
And you notice one set is based
on a square, one is based
on a triangle-- this is the East
Building of the National
Gallery, this is the Louvre--
and one is based on the circle,
that he himself, very often,
was thinking, in designing
elements for his buildings
and for the surrounding space
of the building,
certainly in geometrical ways.
And he was tending to emphasize
these three particular shapes,
the square, the triangle,
and the circle.
And so this relationship between
Pei, minimalism, this
inspiration coming from zen--
although remember, Pei is not
Japanese, he's Chinese,
but nonetheless--
it doesn't rest just
on superficial resemblance.
There's a philosophical sort
of under pinning to it that was
important to Pei.
Interesting, for me,
is when you look at the very
first drawing
that Pei did, when he was
commissioned to design the East
Building.
And he was walking on the campus
here-- and the West Building,
of course, was up,
but nothing else-- the plaza
wasn't there, none
of that stuff.
And so, as you probably all
know, he took out an envelope
that he wanted to draw on.
And he just did a quick sketch
that we now have here
in our archive.
And here it is.
And if you notice,
this is the West Building, which
is part of a square.
The original idea, here, was
they wanted a fountain, not
those pyramids
that we have today.
He wanted a circular fountain
that would echo the fountain
in West Building, rotunda.
He ultimately changed that,
but today we have bollards that
go around the pyramids.
And then he thought
of the building as two
triangles, here.
I find this very interesting,
to say the least.
And he talked about making
this drawing and he said, quote,
"I sketched a trapezoid
on the back of an envelope.
I drew a diagonal line
across the trapezoid
and produced two triangles."
That was the beginning.
So this was his very first
thought, about how all this was
going to go together.
So the West Building, I think,
was the square, the fountain
the circle,
and the East Building was going
to be the triangle.
Now here's what's in the center
today.
Of course, it's these pyramids,
triangular, certainly,
a different kind of fountain.
But I'm going to just sort of
click through and show you
some views of the East Building,
even though we all know what it
looks like.
But sometimes, when you're
focused through a picture,
through the lens of a camera,
you sort of see things that you
might not see just on your own,
so it doesn't necessarily
require any commentary.
These towers, or pods,
these cubic forms here, very
much define the building,
again, the way shapes are
created.
Remember the building was--
we broke ground for the building
in 1971, and it was finished
in 1978.
Here's poor Henry Moore.
I'm going to talk about this
on Thursday,
about how some sculptures may be
in tension with this more
minimalist aspect
of the building.
Certainly, Henry Moore was not
a minimalist, and in fact there
was a lot of discussion
about placing this sculpture
where it is.
And there was a lot
of discussion about what
the sculpture should look like.
And both Jay Carter Brown and I.
M. Pei--
I won't say they ganged up
on Henry Moore,
but they certainly expressed
very strong feelings about how
the sculpture should respond
to the building.
Moore had always believed
that sculpture should not
be subservient to architecture.
And these three guys had
a great discussion about how
this sculpture was ultimately
going to look,
but I'll talk about that more
on Thursday.
If we talk about seriality,
repetition, Gestalt, modular
system--
everywhere in the National
Gallery, these patterns unfold,
most especially, of course,
the triangle as you're all
aware of.
Even here, the reflective idea,
right down to the floor--
compare it to a drawing,
the one I just showed you by Sol
LeWitt.
If you're sensitive, when you
walk through the building
and you look from various points
of view-- because you can walk
the building in so many
different levels and have
different angles--
very often, it's like you're
in the middle
of a minimalist installation.
This is Robert Morris's
untitled installation from 1964,
where he suspends and tilts
and places
these simple geometric shapes.
This is, of course, viewing
the East Building.
This angle here, this is one
of Morris' most famous works
called Untitled L Beams
from 1965.
Each of these beams is exactly
the same dimension, exactly
the same thickness, and exactly
the same weight.
But when you stand
in that space,
you think all three are
different.
They're exactly the same.
They're all exactly the same.
It just depends on placement
and where we are when we look
at these works.
I might be getting carried away,
here.
Pei did not design the stacks
for books, but I think
we have so many places
in the National Gallery--
at least for me, every time
I turn around I'm
thinking about the minimalism,
the pattern here,
repetition of the windows, just
the levels, here.
But then, of course, these
are the levels where the book
stacks are the shelves, that
create a kind of version
of Donald Judd.
This is called Untitled,
then it's subtitled Stack,
from the '60s.
So here is a good example.
In Judd, there are 10 boxes.
Each is nine inches high,
they're spaced nine inches
apart.
And if you wanted to change
the Gestalt,
you could, because it could go
on forever.
Maybe you have a space that can
only accommodate five boxes.
That's fine.
Maybe you have a space that
could accommodate 300 boxes.
That's fine, too.
But you understand immediately
what the Gestalt sort
of thinking
is, here, here, again.
This is the East Building
of the library area
before it was finished.
This was still being worked on
in 1978, before the building
opened.
These are discussions
among the workers here,
so there's nothing in here yet.
But again, especially here,
the skeleton of the building,
just the way the building
unfolds, I'm relating it here
to another Donald Judd,
on the right-- which is, again,
called Untitled,
and it's subtitled, Boxes,
from 1967.
This is the building at night,
minus this, which we'll talk
about on Thursday,
because that's a sculpture
by Frank Stella
that we'll talk about
on Thursday.
That's not
a minimalist sculpture.
Now Pei, clearly, was inspired,
influenced by all
of these things,
by zen philosophy,
by the perfection
of geometric shapes, the sense
of Gestalt. The East Building is
one big Gestalt fest,
because every time you're
in the building you're
aware of the way it works,
but then you're aware of all
these things
and how they kind of relate.
You're looking at the floor,
you're looking at this,
and that, and the other thing.
What's interesting about that
is when you take
the time to look out the window,
and then all of a sudden
you see a tree, it's like, what
the hell's that doing here,
something like that.
Here is Pei's design
for the Museum
of Islamic Art in Doha,
in Qatar, that opened up
in 2008.
So this is one of his most
recent museums
here, which of course should
remind you of Sol LeWitt, which
is our four sided
pyramid on the right, from 1997.
That's in the sculpture garden.
This was a building where Pei
was thinking, obviously,
of cubic forms stacked
in a kind of ziggurat fashion,
so it had it that kind of aspect
to it.
But it's purely, again, a kind
of geometric and cubic idea.
So when we place something
around this building,
for example the Tony Smith--
and here the Smith is hiding
the Henry Moore,
because those two sculptures are
interesting because they have
a, kind of,
a little dialogue going on.
One is kind of saying, you don't
belong here,
and the other one is saying,
oh yes, I do,
because I was commissioned.
I'm going to spend more time
talking about this sculpture,
because I think it's one
of the most beautiful placements
of a sculpture on the campus.
This relationship that the Tony
Smith has to the East Building
is magnificent.
So the site here, the placement
of that sculpture,
was just masterful.
But we would expect--
and very often that was
the case-- that the kinds
of sculptures that spoke
to the East Building
would be of a similar family
resemblance, which is to say
cubic, geometric, minimalist.
Now some of the sculptures that
were created, some of you
have never even seen,
I would venture to say,
because they were up in 1978,
then they were taken down,
and now they're in storage.
Occasionally, they're put back
up.
But one such sculpture is James
Rosati.
This is Untitled.
This was created
for the building.
So it was conceived of in '71,
fabricated in '77
for the opening of the East
Building, And that's where it
was placed, originally.
This is a 1978 photograph
of the opening of the East
Building.
Got a little orchestra, here.
Coming up the stairs,
that's where it was.
I doubt if anybody in this room
has ever seen out.
I don't think it's been up
since 1978.
So this is Rosati, R-O-S-A-T-I,
Untitled.
Here it is again
in its original placement.
This is where the Dubuffet is
today, where the big Dubuffet
sculpture is.
Here it is, arriving, being
unpacked, and installed.
This is Rosati here, and here.
So this is a photograph
from March of 1978,
when finally they were
ready to bring
in the commissioned sculptures,
the Henry Moore, the Anthony
Caro, the Calder, the Rosati,
all the sculptures that had been
commissioned for the actual East
Building opening.
And we'll talk more about that
on Thursday.
So here is Henry.
This is Knife Edge Mirror Two
Piece from 1976, 1978.
And of course, this is Henry
Moore.
He's kind of holding down
the fort.
And what fort he's holding down
is the fort
of traditional sculpture.
In other words, what he's
holding down is the fort that
represents, first of all,
a humanist tradition of making
art in the sense of the artist's
hands and involvement.
The idea of modeling clay
or wax, casting it in bronze,
it is a naturalistic form.
It is biomorphic, sort
of organic.
It relates to life,
it relates to human ideas.
The artist is intimately
involved here.
Even though it was certainly
cast at a foundry, nonetheless
there is much more involvement
here than there would be
in a minimalist sculpture.
Everything I just mentioned--
humanist tradition, modeling,
casting, the body, naturalism--
these are abhorrent
to the minimalists, to
[? Morris, ?]
and to Donald Judd,
and to Tony Smith, everybody
else, you know, that's done,
that's over with.
So we're going to talk about how
this sort of got finessed,
because this is the fight.
It's not a fight.
It's a gentleman's disagreement
here.
Henry Moore cut such
a wide swath over the history
of 20th century sculpture,
but he never abandoned
certain traditional humanistic
ideas about sculpture,
whereas the minimalists,
of course, turned their backs
on almost every one of those.
So now let's start looking
a little more closely at some
of the theoretical ideas
of minimalism
and some of the artists
involved.
And we have to go back
to something we already
mentioned when we talked
about pop art.
And we go back to that 1952
exhibition, This is Tomorrow.
Actually, it was 1956.
But these artists
and the critics
have come together in London
in 1952,
the so-called Independent Group.
And the critic among them,
remember, was this man
on the right, Lawrence Alloway.
So he was sort of the critic,
the writer, for the group,
in many ways, the theorist.
They met in '52, remember,
and then in '56 they put
together this exhibition
that we've already talked
about when we talked about pop
art, sort of defining the nature
of pop art.
Now this is only one part
of Lawrence Alloway's career.
So Lawrence Alloway here
is associated
with the foundations
and the birth of pop art
in London, in England.
He's a seminal figure in all
of that, but he comes to New
York after this.
So here he is now, and he comes
to New York in the early '60s.
And he becomes the curator
at the Guggenheim.
So here he is at the Guggenheim,
now.
And he brings
an incredible resume, obviously,
and incredible knowledge.
He is certainly devoted--
regardless of any relationship
to pop art-- he's devoted
to modernist art
in many of its guises.
And so he had sort of coined
the term, "pop," or "popular
art,"
as we talked about last time.
But he was certainly a supporter
of other modernists.
He wasn't supporting pop art
at the exclusion
of other trends,
unlike some other critics
that we've talked about.
So he was, in fact, looked very
favorably
on abstract expressionism,
the abstract expressionists,
and these young artists who
would have ultimately come to be
known as the minimalists.
Now we talked
about the importance
of exhibitions,
and at this time, each curator
or museum or critic
is putting forward his position.
And the way they normally are
doing it, to get
the maximum exposure,
is to try to curate a show
somewhere.
So you had the Assemblage Show,
the New Images of Man Show,
the Op-Art Show,
remember all those things?
We had the pop art people.
Well, for what we're talking
about today,
there are two major events, two
major catalogs, two
major exhibitions.
And here they are.
So to understand now,
minimalism, you have
to understand what these shows
were about, who curated them,
who were the artists
in these shows.
The first is the catalog
on the left.
And the exhibition was called
Primary Structures, Younger
American and British Sculptors.
That was the full title,
Primary Structures, Younger
American and British Sculptors.
This took place
at the Jewish Museum
in New York,
and it ran from April 27
to June 12, 1966.
It was curated by the curator
there at the Jewish Museum.
Kynaston McShine was his name.
He was the curator of painting
and sculpture, produced
this catalog as a document.
And it was a survey, the show
was a survey of recent sculpture
from artists in the Northeast
of the United States,
California, and Great Britain.
So that's what the exhibition--
those were the artists.
And what brought these artists
together were things like scale,
having a sort of simplified
geometry, smooth, industrial
looking.
They weren't all artists
that today we would consider
minimalist, but they had
that kind of general aesthetic
going on.
And so this was the show that
began to introduce this concept,
as the title says,
of primary structures.
Sometimes minimalism is referred
to as primary structures.
Sometimes it's referred to
as ABC art,
because it's so basic.
But this is one of the catalogs
and one of the shows
that sort of established that.
Five months later, in '66,
five months later, that show
on the right opens up.
And that's at the Guggenheim.
And that's the exhibition called
Systemic Painting,
and it runs from September 24
to November 27, 1966.
And Lawrence Alloway organizes
that, so he's at the Guggenheim,
and he organizes that show.
And again, that exhibition,
believe me, cast a real light
in that.
We got a lot of people in there
that, today, we wouldn't
necessarily think go together.
So it had a particularly wide
sort of array, but it dealt
with things
like geometric abstract
painting, artworks that had
a simple, kind
of minimal, methodical,
repetitious kind
of characteristic.
This term "systemic painting"
is coined by Alloway.
He's great at coining phrases.
He comes up
with "systemic painting," which
is this idea that these are
paintings based on a system,
a certain mathematical formula,
almost, that you can understand.
But he put into the show
a lot of people
that we could quibble about,
in terms of how they go
together.
For example, Frank Stella's
in the show,
so some of his shaped canvases--
Kenneth Nolan, from DC, he's
in the show.
Thomas Downing is in the show,
from DC.
He has other hard edged people
in the exhibition.
He has Jo Baer Agnes Martin,
they're in the exhibition.
So it's really a kind
of broad, inclusive exhibition.
Here's the installation.
So this is Lawrence Alloway
here, and he's over here.
Anybody know what that painting,
who that's by?
You should.
That's going up there.
Who does the dots?
Downing, that's a Thomas Downing
that's been installed.
There, this painting that's
going up there,
is called the Sartorial Habits
of Billy Bo by Neil Williams.
This is a Frank Stella, that's
a Thomas Downing.
So you can see hard edge people
with color school people.
There's a lot going on here.
So here it is being installed
by Alloway in these two shots,
here.
These two exhibitions, these two
catalogs, today,
remain the sort
of primary source, inspiration,
documents, whatever you want
to refer to it,
that really start to put
this kind of art--
that ultimately,
especially, what we'll call
minimalist--
are kind of on everybody's radar
screen.
So here's our room upstairs,
now, in the East Building.
That's sort of the entrance
into this area of minimal,
post minimal, and conceptual.
That's a David Novros--
these go together--
David Novros, Untitled,
from 1965.
That's a Donald Judd
on the floor, very important one
from '63, it's Untitled.
Here again, you know, like
with the Mondrian,
if you just say Composition
in Red, Yellow, Blue,
you're usually OK.
In this case,
just say it's Untitled,
and you're probably OK.
So this is Robert Reitman's
painting, Untitled, from 1961,
so '65, '63, '61, altogether.
Donald Judd is a seminal figure.
He's sort
of the minimalist philosopher.
He's the guy who's almost as
active as a writer, theorist,
critic.
He reviews numerous works.
I mentioned, remember, he
reviewed exhibitions by Paul
Reed and some of the DC color
school people.
But he decides to abandon,
essentially, painting on canvas
and painting
in general for a simple object,
as you see here, this red object
that's constructed.
First, his objects
are constructed from wood, then
masonite.
Then he tries painted metal,
stainless steel, and ultimately,
Plexiglass.
But they have to be hard,
industrial produced,
and ultimately, again,
hard and industrial produced
materials.
So he is involved
in this critical debate
about what is, in fact,
a painting at this time,
the nature of painting.
And ironically, it's
this discussion about what's
the nature of painting amidst
minimalism that resuscitates
an interest in sculpture.
Sculpture is always sort
of the stepchild to painting,
in so many ways.
But with the minimalist
now, sculpture, even though they
start by talking about what
is a painting, they end up
creating works that are
essentially sculptural.
And so sculpture comes back
to the forefront.
So it has a renewed appreciation
among artists and critics.
So one of the things that Judd
talks about, in relationship
to the sculpture and his work
in general, he says,
quote, "Three dimensions are
real space.
That gets rid of the problem
of illusionism
and of literal space.
Space in and around marks
and colors,
which is one of the most
salient and objectionable relics
of a European art,
the several limits of painting
are no longer present.
A work can be as powerful as it
is thought to be.
Actual space is intrinsically
more powerful
and specific than paint
on a flat surface."
So he's talking about people
like Greenberg, who are going
on and on about flatness
and space and the surface.
And now he plunks down
his object, and essentially he
says, here, take that.
This exists now, in real space.
Nonetheless it is painted,
it has a color.
And so he's doing away
with the whole idea of painting,
surface, composition, sort
of how that goes together,
and ordering a space
with the very, sheer presence
of something,
that we have to sort of deal
with as we enter a space.
So here, depending on how you
move around it,
it creates and makes you
aware of certain relationships
to the space,
your relationship to the work,
and your relationship
to the space, as well.
'63 is a watershed year
for Judd, because it's when he
exhibits this work,
specifically,
along with a number of others
at the Green Gallery in New York
City.
So he creates, in essence,
these large, simplified, three
dimensional objects that sit
on the ground, no pedestal, that
have a presence.
They're essential,
they're self-contained,
they're holistic, they're not
referring to anything else,
they're a-historical.
It's not a receptacle,
it's not for recycling, none
of this sort of stuff.
So he defines the floor boxes--
which is sometimes what he calls
these-- as, quote, "The top,
the whole shape,
and the interior volume
are all one at the same time."
The top, the volume, inside,
outside, it's all beautifully,
kind of, together.
The color is important he comes
to favor-- although not
exclusively, but at this stage--
this is cadmium red paint.
I should take that back.
It's a cadmium red, but that's
not painted that is part
of the actual--
it's fabricated that way,
with that color.
So I'm not painting.
I'm not having a brush stroke,
there's no touch here,
there's no sense
that, as an artist,
I've somehow intervened
onto this.
Why he liked the red
is because he was so influenced,
as so many minimalists were,
by Barnett Newman.
And Barnett Newman's paintings
that had the zip, and then
these red fields--
we'll talk more about Newman
and even Judd as we go along.
This is Tony Smith, who kind of
looks like a philosopher
or a professor here.
He was, in many ways,
all of these things.
This is a photograph in 1966,
and then this is Smith
in his backyard.
He was always wearing a suit
and tie, even when he's
in the place where they're
fabricating his sculptures.
He was from New Jersey,
and this is his backyard in New
Jersey, where he would have all
of his maquettes, his models,
that would ultimately
be translated into large scale
work.
He was born in South Orange, New
Jersey.
He came from a waterworks
manufacturing family,
so he knew about
industrial materials
and fabrication from the time he
was a boy.
He contracted tuberculosis
as a youth, and his father
actually made him a kind of one
room, pre-fabricated house out
in the backyard, where he could
stay and not be subjected
to getting germs and things.
It was like living in a bubble,
like a bubble boy,
because he had a very fragile
immune system, initially.
He had a nurse who was attending
him.
He was home schooled
because of that.
When his medicine would arrive,
it arrived
in little cubic boxes.
And so he would take
the medicine, and then he would
start stacking these boxes
and extending them.
And that's probably
the first time he started
thinking like this.
And when he felt better,
he could go visit the waterworks
and see all these machines,
and fabrication, and metal,
and things like that.
He went to Fordham University,
never finished.
Then he went to Georgetown,
never finished, came back to New
Jersey, opened up a bookstore
during the depression,
'34, '36, worked in the family
factory.
Then he started to take courses
at the Arts Students League
in New York.
Ultimately he moved to Chicago,
and now he studies architecture.
First he studies
with the so-called New Bauhaus
in Chicago, then he studied
with Frank Lloyd Wright.
He never is licensed
as an architect,
but architecture becomes
a great interest of his.
And finally, he decides, though,
that--
he did design some houses
and things, even though he was
not a licensed architect--
but ultimately he decides
he wants to be an artist,
a sculptor, or at least, let's
say, a fabricator.
This is the work that sort of
set him in motion.
He taught for a while.
He taught design at Hunter
College.
And this work on the left--
well, they are both the same
work, but different versions--
it's called Black Box,
from 1962.
Sometimes these things are
replicated, so you could have
more than one
in a different museum.
There were three of these.
It's a series of three.
And so the first one is the one
on the left.
That's the, historically,
the very important one that's
still at the estate
or the foundation of Tony Smith.
The one on the right
is the second of the three,
and that's in Ottawa
at the National Gallery
of Canada.
So they're exactly the same,
more or less.
We give more weight to this one
because this is the first time
he creates this black box, 1962.
It's steel, with an oil finish,
and they're exactly
the same dimensions, 21 and 1/2
inches, by 33, by 25.
So they're not big.
So he was in the office of one
of his colleagues
at Hunter College in 1956,
where he was teaching,
and his colleague had an index
file on his desk.
And so Smith started to look
at that file, which was just
a box, you know, for index
cards.
And he thought, you know,
that's kind of interesting.
As I look at it, it's just
a simple shape.
So he called the fabricator,
the foundry fabricator,
and he commissioned the box
to be made that was 2 feet by 3
feet by 2 feet, essentially
this shape and size right here.
I'm just simplifying.
When he called the fabricators
and said what he wanted,
they said, why do you want that?
I mean, should it have a drawer,
should it have this, should it
have that?
They didn't understand,
and he gave them very specific
instructions.
And then they said, well, OK,
it's your dime.
And then they got really, OK,
we're going to give this guy
the best box he's ever seen,
you know, and this is the one
that they created, here.
This is his first fabricated
steel sculpture.
So when I say fabricated,
somebody fabricated it.
He gave the dimensions,
the instructions,
all of the information,
and then a fabrication place
made it.
This is the parent
to the sculpture we have, called
Die, that I'll show you
in a second,
and also to a sculpture
that we don't own,
called Free Ride which is made
in the same year, but later
in the same year.
So this is his breakthrough kind
of idea here.
He had this sitting
in his backyard.
And his daughter came out, who
was young.
I think she was eight or nine
at the time.
And she thought it looked
like a tombstone, and she asked
him who was buried there.
And that might have, in fact,
prompted the term Black and Die.
It's a die, like a dice,
but die is death.
And we're going to talk
about that now, because what
this work led to
is this work that we have
at the National Gallery.
So this is Die, same year, '62,
but later in the year,
and of course much, much, much
bigger.
This is a 6 foot cube, as I'm
sure you know.
So he first made a 6 inch
cardboard model of this,
in black cardboard, in '62,
but it wasn't actually
fabricated until '68.
The idea is '62.
In here, he telephoned--
the firm he worked with
was called the Industrial
Welding Company in Newark, New
Jersey.
And the thing that attracted him
to this company
was that, every time he would
pass their location,
they had a sign that said,
quote, "You specify it,
we fabricate it."
And he thought, that was great,
I love that.
So he started specifying, you
know, make me this,
make me that.
So his actual instructions would
survive, that he sent
to the fabrication plant here.
He said, "I want a 6 foot cube
of quarter inch hot rolled steel
with diagonal internal bracing."
So inside, it's braced
diagonally.
And that's what they gave him.
When he came up with the size,
6' by 6', he thought
that that size related
to human proportion.
Some minimalists have this
feeling that--
Robert Morris, especially,
but also Tony Smith--
about somehow relating
the sculpture to a human scale,
but not referencing a human,
but at least to a human kind
of scale.
He said about this measurement,
because he was very specific
about it, that if it were any
larger, it would be a monument,
if it were any smaller,
it would be a mere object.
So he felt this was
the perfect in-between,
whether being a monument
or an object.
The title was important,
and so, again, this is not
like most minimalists, who don't
give titles and have you start
thinking about things outside
of the object itself,
but Smith is a little bit
different.
And he liked the term "die,"
D-I-E, because it did relate
to dice, when a single object
in that sense, it
referred to "die,"
"dying," to "death."
And then he said at one point
that it had
multiple associations
and, quote, "It alludes to die
casting," right, so you die
cast, "to one of a pair of dice,
and ultimately, to death."
So it has three connotations
in his mind, the fabrication
concept, death concept,
and the game, or the dice.
And then the reason
it was 6 feet--
in another sort of remark,
he says, "Six feet has
a suggestion of being cooked,"
by that, he means dead,
"6 foot box, 6 feet under."
So he liked all of that.
So for Smith, very often
the title--
first of all, that makes
a difference between Smith
and Morris or Judd,
giving things titles that take
you off and make you
think about alliterations.
In other words, meaning in Tony
Smith is relative.
He likes that, that we can all
have a different kind
of connotation.
We're installing, at the moment,
Rachel Whiteread,
down in the concourse.
This will be coming back out.
This is the work we own
by Wright we called Ghost,
on the left, from 1990.
And this is, again,
Die from Tony Smith.
I'm just mentioning,
briefly, here, Whiteread
in the sense that her work does
seem to appear, at least
formally,
to be minimal, because she works
usually in cubic or very
pronounced geometric shapes.
But of course, the big, big
difference between Rachel
Whiteread and any
of the minimalists-- even Tony
Smith, who often gives things
some kind of a title--
is that her works are all
about things like emotion
and memory and nostalgia.
Somebody lived in this house,
and somebody's gone,
and the remnants of life,
and all of these things
that minimalists are not
interested in.
So she takes the shape.
She takes this minimalist shape,
but then what she does with it
is something very, very
different.
Sometimes, people have described
her work as minimalism
with a heart.
I don't know.
But clearly, there are
these additional layers
of significance for Rachel
Whiteread.
So she adopts and accepts
the formal language,
but not so much the message
that she's putting forward.
This is out in the sculpture
garden, Moondog by Tony Smith.
Again, the model is '64.
Sometimes, he creates the model
and doesn't fabricate it
for many years.
So this model is '64,
but it was fabricated in 1998.
It's painted aluminum.
He becomes particularly
interested in the polygon, not
just the cube
or the square or the triangle.
And this use of the polygon
will be very influential
on younger artists
later, like Rosati.
We just saw a Rosati work that
was more about polyhedrons
and things like that.
Again this has a title, Moondog.
And he says, about titles, "I'm
interested
in the inscrutability,
the mysteriousness
of the thing."
So the title, which is a very
non-minimal device, immediately
we start thinking about Moon
Dog.
What does that mean?
What does it mean to him?
And Moondog was the name
of a blind singer
that he knew on the streets
of New York City.
In the '60s, this guy would sing
on the streets for money
and his nickname was Moondog.
But the other thing that Smith
said it related to, the title,
was that painting by Joan Miro,
of the dog barking at the moon.
You know, that painting
with the ladder?
So those two things somehow got
into his head.
But here, again, despite that,
the rigor, the geometry,
the mathematical precision,
the formulas, the conceptual
laying out of this
are very rigorous.
In '66, Smith said
about his sculptures in general,
quote, "that they were part
of a continuous space grid.
Voids are made up
of the same components
as the masses.
In this sense, the sculptures
may even be seen
as interruptions in an otherwise
unbroken flow of space.
If you think of space as solid,
there are voids in that space.
While I hope that they have form
and presence, I don't think
of them as being objects
among other objects.
I think of them as being
isolated
in their own environments."
So you see,
this whole mathematical
precision idea about space
and form,
how it exists environmentally,
is very much a part of all
the minimalists.
He creates, here, this lattice
motif, which he'll use
repeatedly,
so it looks
like an interlaced sort
of [INAUDIBLE]
of geometric shape.
If you actually count the parts
of this sculpture,
there are 15 octahedrons and 10
tetrahedrons.
So he's very
specific about the shape,
how often he repeats it,
and then how he sort of
assembles it.
It has a very rational geometry.
And that geometry is grounded
in a certain regularity
and repetition,
so it has this Gestalt idea,
again, that's very important.
Here is Smith
with his sculpture,
one of three, and one of which
we have.
The Snake is Out, this is
the version that's in Bryant
Park, in New York.
This is a photograph from '67,
and here it is being fabricated.
So there he is, wearing a tie.
So this is at the Industrial
Welding Company in Newark, New
Jersey.
They're the people who
fabricated his art, most
of his works.
And this photograph is from 1967
as well, here.
Now that's the work that we have
outside the East Building,
that you see being fabricated
there, in one version.
There are three additions
of this as well.
So that's one of them there.
Talking about the title,
of course--
The Snake is Out, that's
the title of the work.
And he said about that, "I don't
know just when Snake was done.
I had made a tetrahedral piece
in brass
in 1961, several plaster models,
and one other piece in wood,
before Snake.
The Ladder was probably made
just after Die."
So we have a tight sequence,
here, Black Box, Die, The Snake
is Out.
"It began as a chance
arrangement of units.
At first, there was not
a particular base,
the final form being arrived
at out of the need
for stability."
Again these works are as
much about engineering as they
are about art.
These guys are architects,
engineers, and sculptors.
And the guy who this really
relates to later
is the big bad boy, Richard
Serra, whose works kind of kill
people, quite literally.
So then he goes on to say,
"As in other cases,
the title came later.
It was taken from the John
McNulty story, Third Avenue
Medicine.
You know John McNulty's writing?
He wrote for The New Yorker
between the '30s and up till '56
or '57.
And he always writes about New
York, or wrote about New York.
And he wrote a story called
Third Avenue Medicine.
And in that story,
there's this sentence
that McNulty writes, "The snake
is an ordinary little vein.
Or maybe it is an artery that
runs along the left temple
of a man's head."
He read that sentence out loud.
I love that sentence.
So that's how this got
its title.
So here it is being fabricated.
Here's the version that's in New
York.
And now I'm going to just show
you again, because I think
this placement at the gallery
is magnificent,
against the geometry
and the space of this wall.
And you have to really
circulate.
In fact, if you have a camera
that has sort of a wide angle
lens, if you come to photograph
this and if you get far enough,
just a little bit past this,
you can get the Capitol
Building.
And then you have the dome
of the Capitol, classic,
neoclassical,
you've got the East Building,
and you've got the sculpture.
It's really a great photograph,
the way this thing changes
and speaks to the building
as you move.
Sometimes, you can't even figure
it out.
I mean, you look at it one way
and you think it looks like--
maybe it's an arch.
And then you realize,
oh my gosh, there's
this whole part that goes
that way and goes this way.
Now very different, obviously,
is Carl Andre.
And we have these works now
installed upstairs.
On the left is a 64" copper
square from 1969,
and on the right is a 64" steel
square from '67.
Carl Andre is, again, a kind
of pure minimalist in many ways.
He goes beyond, again,
this idea--
he's not interested in the craft
of art,
making things, technique,
how good I am with my hands.
But what he does is simply
buy pre-fabricated square sheets
of things or, in one case,
they were firebricks.
Some of his earliest works.
He just bought bricks,
these firebricks, that are kind
of a beige color.
And he did nothing to them.
He didn't scratch them,
he didn't write on them,
he didn't cut them,
he didn't break them.
He just stacked them
on the floor
in different configurations.
They were just ordinary building
bricks, nothing special.
And he arranged them-- they're
industrial materials--
and he arranged them
on the floor.
And he said that what he was
getting at was that these things
cut the space.
So they cut the space
of the gallery that you were in,
they kind of sliced
across the gallery floor.
And the other thing that he
was--
at least in the metal pieces,
these pieces here-- that he was
quite adamant about, or at least
was OK with,
was walking on these.
In fact, we have to put a sign
now, saying--
instead of "do not touch,"
now we have a sign that say,
"you're allowed to walk
on these."
So he was fine with you walking
onto the sculptures.
They're on the floor,
no pedestal.
They're totally flat.
He talks about-- in one
interview that I heard from him,
he said something like, we all
start on the floor, when you're
crawling as a baby.
And so he's against anything
that is anthropomorphic,
that is going to, again, suggest
the idea of a body.
It's a Gestalt because in both
of these cases, it's 8" by 8".
Eight by eight is 64.
In your mind, you can replicate
this forever, right, and just
continue to expand it, so
that idea of a pure Gestalt,
that we understand, immediately,
the pattern and the sequencing
here of how things are laid out.
So it's systemic.
It's serial and systemic,
there's a system to it.
Here's the sign that says, go
ahead and walk.
I don't know, there is something
very, very special,
very electric, almost,
about standing on these things,
because it seems to cut
across every taboo
that we've had about being
in a museum,
and touching works,
and certainly not standing
on works.
Each person who stands
on these works, we do, in fact
become part of the work.
And then each work is different
because we're all different
as we stand on it.
They're not fastened together.
There's no glue or welds
or anything.
They're just laid down
with no attachment.
He never has welded anything
together, or fastened anything
together.
Is just placement and gravity.
And there is something
about feeling the frisson when
you're standing on this that--
I don't know, it's kind
of a rush, I have to say.
I mean, although, you know,
I'm easy to please.
Most of the time,
he doesn't even-- he'll think
of the work, but this is not
the work--
for example, I'm not going to do
this in my studio, right?
He just takes them all
to the site,
it's going to be a show
at this gallery or this museum
or something, and he lays them
out.
And then he might change it,
he might-- well, in this space,
maybe I'm going to change
the system a bit,
that kind of thing.
Of course, Dan Flavin
is a minimalist.
He works in yet
another industrial material,
fluorescent lights,
that he does not alter at all.
He just goes and buys them,
like we would buy them
for our kitchen.
He doesn't alter them, change
them, paint them, touch them.
He just puts them together.
And these are two that we have
in our collection.
It's very hard to exhibit
Flavin, of course,
because it's going to affect
everything else in the room.
So this is Monument for V.
Taplin--
that's Vladimir Taplin--
on the left, from '68.
It's just a cool white
fluorescent light composition.
Same title, Monument for V.
Taplin, 1969, on the right--
Flavin is born in New York,
goes into the Air Force,
comes out and studies
art history, initially,
at the New School
for Social Research.
And then he goes on to Columbia
University.
He has an interest in art,
but he actually has
no formal training
or instruction.
He begins to think
about this industrial material,
and he's
interested in minimalist ideas.
And so he begins to experiment
with electric light
and with light in general.
And here we have
a different idea.
Now, for the whole history
of art, we've been talking about
light, you know,
light, chiaroscuro, illusionism,
light and shadow, and this
and that.
Not going to plug-in a bulb,
you know, and so there you go.
There's your light.
You know, so he's demystifying
all of that, oh my god, look
at that shadow, it's gorgeous.
He's very interested--
a lot of these artists,
the minimalists,
were
interested
in Russian constructivism, so
people like Taplin, Rodchenko,
Lissitzky,
all these people who were
active at the time
of the Russian Revolution,
and who were creating these very
constructed works that looked
built in that particular way.
So this is a work that he pays
homage to Taplin, who created
a very important work that I'm
sure you've seen.
It's this work on the right,
which we know today
from a photograph.
This was Taplin's Monument
to the Third International,
from 1920.
This was a model for a building
that he hoped to build.
And the model was made of wood,
cardboard, wire metal, and oil
paper.
The model itself was 16 feet
high.
But inside this building,
there would be a cone, a cube,
and a cylinder, here, here,
and here.
And this would be a building
that would emit noise,
and sound, and light.
So it was a very avant garde,
constructivist kind of idea.
But it would have light,
and that's something that
captured Flavin's attention.
And he says about light, quote,
"One might not think of light
as a matter of fact, but I do.
And it is, as I said,
as plain and open
and direct in art
as you will ever find."
So here's another tribute.
This is called, again, Monument
for Vladimir Taplin in 1966.
So it's a series of works.
And we have three of these
at the National Gallery.
But again, they're not always
on display.
We own this work, too,
on the left.
This is Flavin's Untitled,
and then it's subtitled,
"To Barnett Newman
to commemorate
his simple problem red,
yellow, and blue," from 1970.
Now what he's referring to
is a painting, or a series
of paintings,
by Newman, one of which
you see on the right.
That's Barnett Newman's painting
from 1966, called Who's Afraid
of Red, Yellow, and Blue.
And Newman, because thinking
back to Mondrian and others,
had done a whole series
of paintings with this zip idea.
Sometimes it comes down
to the center.
Flavin was obsessed
with these paintings
in the same way
that Newman was obsessed
with them in relationship
to earlier history of art.
So he did kind
of a light version,
you might say.
This work goes in a corner,
so it comes across.
We have this in the exhibition.
We had it up in 2004.
So again, Newman was seen
in many ways as a precursor
to minimalism.
These paintings on the right
were almost seen as a kind
of precursor
to minimalist ideas.
But of course, the minimalists
draw in other tendencies
in terms of materials,
procedures, systems, et
cetera, that Newman was not
involved with.
You may remember-- how many
people saw the Flavin Show?
Yeah, I know it's a while ago,
it was 2004.
We had this work.
So we had the retrospective
on Dan Flavin here, and that ran
from October 3, 2004
to January 9, 2005.
And the work we had
on the mezzanine was this work,
here, which is titled--
well, again, it's Untitled,
and then the subtitle is,
"To you, [? Heiner, ?]
with admiration and affection,"
from 1973.
This was a magnificent work.
Again, it's a large scale work.
It became a focus--
these large scale installations
became a focus of Flavin's
late career, very site
specific lights
for particular situations.
He had created one of his most
famous works,
was doing the interior
of the Rotunda
at the Guggenheim,
with all light.
So this was a kind of a baby
version, I guess, of that,
because that was
a huge installation
at the Guggenheim.
He did the same thing, taking
over a railroad station
in Berlin, where the light was
everywhere, also a church
in Milan.
So he was working
on these large scale
installations late in his life.
He was just totally
dedicated to this use
of these fluorescent lights.
This is 120 feet long.
But it's modular,
so in a different space
he could make it 300 feet long,
or 10 feet long,
depending on where he was
placing it.
It redefined
the mezzanine terrace when you
went up, because you had to walk
around it.
It wasn't against the windows,
but you had to kind of negotiate
the space in a completely
different way.
So in minimalism, very often,
this thing, whatever it is
that's plunked down,
makes you think about your space
and look at it in a way
that you hadn't thought about it
before.
But the best thing
about this work was, at night,
if you are outside
on Pennsylvania Avenue
or whatnot--
because we kept it illuminated
at night, you would have this
green glow going all the way
down Pennsylvania Avenue,
out the windows.
So it literally affected
the environment of the city,
in that sense.
Now, there are painters that we
associate with minimalism.
And two of the best are here.
This is another very good slide.
Actually, that's not a very good
slide, it's a little washed out.
This is Agnes Martin,
and this is Robert Ryman.
So the Agnes Martin work
is Untitled Number Two
from 1981.
It's acrylic.
Let me go to a detail.
Here's the detail.
And this is a detail
of the Ryman surface.
So the Agnes Martin
is acrylic with blue pencil
on canvas.
The Ryman is oil on linen.
Agnes Martin, she was born
in Canada, Saskatchewan, in '32.
But then she came to the United
States.
She studied at Columbia.
She worked and taught
in various parts of the country.
She was in New York
by '57, so she's very much
a part of that fermenting
period.
She had started
as a realistic painter.
If you look at her early stuff,
it's realistic.
Then she goes to a kind
of surrealist phase,
where she is creating these kind
of very personal
biomorphic kinds of paintings.
But she became more and more
interested in order
and geometry, and a kind
of refinement to painting.
And she gradually came to this
style, where she worked,
essentially,
on horizontal-vertical grids
that could be totally
horizontal-- sometimes they were
a grid, like a checkerboard--
in which she uses very faint
color.
And then she uses pencil lines.
And she does not use
a straight edge.
So the delicacy
of her paintings, when you get
close--
this is an artist who has
to draw a pencil line
across, like, a five foot
canvas.
And let me tell you,
when you're looking
at that line, you're like,
oh my God, you know, how could
you do this?
Don't breathe, don't sneeze.
There's something about the fact
that these are drawn, and not--
I didn't just do it
with a straight edge, that gives
it a very powerful sense
of presence.
There's an austerity to her art,
but there's also an elegance.
The line is almost tremulous
because, you know, she's not
using a [? mall ?] stick
or anything,
where she's resting her arm.
So she's just, freehand, trying
to draw this very, very
faint and beautiful line.
For Martin herself,
I think she did see this process
and geometry as something
spiritual, something kind
of transcendental,
to be in that particular moment.
She eventually goes off
to Mexico because, later
in life, she does seek this,
kind of, more transcendental,
quiet, spiritual life.
And so she leaves the east
and ends up settling in New
Mexico.
She dies in Taos, in 2004.
Ryman is still with us.
He's 88 now, as far as I know.
His paintings, you know-- very
often, what we have--
and again, it seems
contrary to minimalism-- what's
minimalist here
is the purity of the white,
that kind of thing,
but certainly these are artists
who are making marks
and have touch, and all of that.
And that's what's
great about Ryman, is his sense
of touch.
Kind of blurry,
but the whole idea of mark
making for an artist
has a long history.
And when you look at the care,
and the effort,
and the energy that goes
into mark making in both cases,
here, these little pencil lines,
and then these broader strokes,
here--
and there is this thing
about white.
Personally, I love
white paintings.
I love this idea that it's
white, and maybe all white,
and that within that you have
to look carefully.
For example, you notice
a little blue here,
are just
these little inflections
of blue.
So one of the things
about paintings like this,
especially the Ryman,
is how it will change
in the light of its space,
because it reflects the light.
In other words,
if you're at the gallery
and it's darker,
that's one thing.
It's lighter, it's something
else.
If light is hitting it,
if there's a shadow on it,
there's this kind of change
as we go along.
It affects-- as you can
certainly see here--
it affects Agnes Martin, too.
Now I want to come back
to somebody I mentioned, just
very quickly, in passing,
in a different context.
Remember this, right?
That's the Richard Hamilton
collage about what is it that
makes life so appealing.
I can't remember the title.
And I mentioned that we saw
where he cut all these things
out.
And I mentioned this lady, here.
And I told you, if you remember,
that it's an artist, an American
painter named Jo Baer, B-A-E-R,
and here she is.
She becomes a very important
part of minimalism.
And we have one of her most
famous works.
It's a diptych.
So this is her.
She's still alive, she was born
in 1929.
And I think this is a photograph
from 2013, here,
when she was having a show
in Germany.
This is what we have.
Now this is, again--
it requires a lot of attention.
The title of this painting--
it's a diptych--
the title is Horizontals
Flanking, and then it's
subtitled
"small, pthalo green line,"
1968.
Now in a photograph like this,
you basically can't see anything
except that it's a white canvas.
But that's not
the important part.
So the title, Horizontals,
they're horizontal, right?
And then the next part
of the title, Flanking, they
flank each other, right?
And then it says "small pthalo
green line."
Now I had to go up
and photograph this.
There's the line.
This is not a frame.
This is black paint.
This is the wall of the gallery.
This is the black edge
with the green.
That's what runs around here.
And then the center part
is white.
So now here, again--
you either love this stuff
or you don't, because it kind of
exists in a place--
she's dealing with edge.
We always talk about,
in painting, edge tension, what
goes on in the edge
of a painting, whether it bleeds
off, or whether it's intact.
And there's always
this discussion of how things
are illuminated, if you have
a white center, that things
on the edge
get illuminated more strongly.
So she's playing with a lot
of conceptual ideas,
here, about edge, about color,
about whiteness, all
of these things.
So it's
this expansive white field
that's then bounded by the edges
of a black line
and a green line.
Believe me, that white is
meticulously painted.
It's not just the bare canvas.
But she meticulously paints
that white area with an acrylic
and she creates a very flat kind
of surface.
And then those edges are really
quite important and interesting,
when you finally get
to the space.
But looking at this,
you would never know what we're
dealing with, here.
Now we come to Robert Morris,
who's a big player.
We just recently installed
this work.
This is Untitled and then
subtitled, "battered cubes,"
from 1966.
It's a four part work.
These are painted fiberglass,
four units.
This term, "batter,"
B-A-T-T-E-R, or "battered,"
B-A-T-T-E-R-E-D, refers
to an architectural term
for a wall that inclines like
this.
This is called a battered wall,
in architecture.
You know those ceremonial pylon
gates in Egyptian architecture?
They all come up like that.
That's a pylon wall, a pylon
gate.
That is battered.
So this is an architectural term
for this movement
that you see here.
Morris is one of the pioneers,
along with Judd.
I mean, they are two very, very
significant players,
especially because they write
a lot about minimalism.
One of the most important texts
you have to read
about minimalism,
if you're studying this,
is Morris's notes on sculpture,
which is very, very important.
And Morris is the guy who
is the most attuned
and sensitive to Gestalt
theory, to the idea
that when you have
a group of things,
they can be separate
but they have to work together.
And he's also particularly
sensitive to the idea
that it should have
a human relationship
in proportion.
So he wants you-- depending
on how these things are
installed,
he gives specific instructions
about the distance.
But he wants you to walk
through these
and to see
these different points of view,
and to understand
the various parts
and how they're going together
to making the whole.
And he is OK with a curator
saying,
well I've got a small room,
or, well, maybe I've
got a big room, changing
dimensions here.
So maybe they're further apart
or closer together.
He's totally fine with that.
But he says that-- always,
in one of his instructions,
it says that they, quote,
"always maintaining enough room
between them for walking."
So however you do it, that
should be the thing.
So remember, Morris is the guy
who said that sculpture was
scale, proportion, shape,
and mass.
And then he went on to say
that they should create
strong Gestalt sensations,
so patterns, configurations,
parts to the whole, all of this.
At another point, he writes,
quote, "Simplicity of shape
does not necessarily equate
with simplicity of experience.
Unitary forms do not reduce
relationships."
So you might have one structure,
you know, you've got a block
on the floor.
Because it's not related
to another block, doesn't mean
there isn't meaning there,
and that it's not referring
to our relationship to this.
Eventually, Morris is one
of the prime artists
of minimalism,
until he gets later
in his career.
And then he becomes one
of the prime exponents of post
minimalism.
And what is that?
Well, you'll be happy to know
it gives you a lot more to go
on.
This is the work we have,
the big felt piece that we have
here the gallery.
It's Untitled, from 1976.
Morris is
the transitional figure
from minimalism to post
minimalism,
understanding that shift
from minimal to post minimal.
So by the late '60s, he now is
starting to think about-- not
form, the minimalists are about
form--
now he's thinking about what he
calls "anti-form", against
the form.
In other words,
if you have a Donald Judd,
or even that earlier Battered
piece by Morris, those things
aren't changing.
Those cubes, those shapes
are
inviolate and self-referential,
right?
Come back in two days,
it's still going to be the same.
But now, by shifting materials
or by shifting relationships,
post minimalists become, now,
interested more in process
and anti-form.
So what happens
with this great felt piece?
And by the way, you should look
up some
of his other felt pieces.
They're absolutely stunning.
They look like gigantic birds
and things coming off the wall.
So what's going on, here?
Well, this is felt. It's
a primary object,
it's a primary structure.
It has all of the integrity
of minimalist ideas behind it,
right, triangles, all
that stuff.
But it's felt, which means
that, depending on the time
of day, the humidity,
the temperature, whether it's
winter or summer,
the felt could sag.
It could start to move
in a certain way.
That's process, that's
anti-form, and that is post
minimalism.
You start to get artists more
and more concerned
with, now, violating form
and allowing the work
to be subject to the effects
of randomness, of effects
of the chance, what might happen
now as the temperature
changes, or the humidity, et
cetera.
So when he talks about--
his notes of sculpture were--
even his writing was
serialized--
in Four Issues of Art Form.
But one of the things
he says about anti-form,
he says, quote, "Random piling,
loose stacking, hanging,
give passing form
to the material.
Change is accepted,
and indeterminacy is implied,
since replacing will result
in another configuration."
So at first,
what he does with the felt,
he just stacks it.
He throws it on the floor
and just stacks it.
And then all of a sudden,
it starts to lean and fall
in different configurations.
The wall pieces, though, are
really quite stunning, the ones
that are hung on the wall.
This is also interesting,
because it's
so anti-minimal in the sense
that it's so tactile.
It's felt,
so you want to kind of go up
there and pet it.
And believe me, you don't do
that with a Donald Judd.
So it it's unpredictable, now.
There's an unpredictability
about it.
There's a contingency about it,
which is what post minimalist
artists are interested in, even
if they started as minimalists,
as Morris did.
So here's just another view.
So here's Richard Serra,
S-E-R-R-A, Richard Serra.
He was born in 1939, in San
Francisco.
So his father
was a Spanish native
from Majorca.
His mother was a Russian Jew
from Odessa.
She committed suicide in 1979.
He studied
his first English literature
at Berkeley.
Then he goes to the University
of California at Santa Barbara.
He's a West Coast guy, at least
initially.
He supports himself by working
in, you know, on the West Coast
in steel mills.
His father was a pipe fitter,
so his father worked in the San
Francisco shipyards
as a pipe fitter.
So he was aware of that world.
Then he decides to study art
instead of literature.
He goes to Yale, gets a BFA
and an MFA between '61 and '64.
He starts his first kind
of sculptures
in nontraditional materials,
using things like rubber,
some fiberglass, that he sort
of molds, in 1966.
His earliest works are abstract.
And in keeping with what I just
said about Morris, they're
very process-based.
So something's going to happen.
They're going to change,
or there's going to be some kind
of process.
So one of the most interesting
things he does early
in his career
is he gets a piece of paper
and a pencil,
and he starts writing down
sculptural processes, as many
as he can think of, as verbs.
They're initially like word
infinitives, so they were things
like "to splash," "to cast,"
"to crimp," "to roll,"
"to tear," "to cut."
He just starts making this list,
everything he can think of,
that's a sculptural process.
And he writes it
as an infinitive verb.
And then he begins, in the '60s,
to experiment with trying to do
each one of those techniques
as a kind of process.
So here he is.
One of the most famous
was "splashing," "to splash,"
and this is 1968, here
on the left.
And what he does is to take
molten lead-- he melts lead--
and then he takes a ladle,
and then he goes to the wall
with this ladle
full of hot molten lead,
and he hurls it to splash it
against the wall.
And then it sticks
in various ways that you see,
here.
So all this splashing, casting,
all of this work
is done in the '60s.
And what he is expressing,
or what he's experimenting with,
is process, all
the different processes he can
think of, roll, crimp hurl, all
of this, sometimes both
at the same time.
So he did this as an exhibition.
In fact, what you're looking
at here--
the initial one was done in Leo
Castelli's Castelli had
a warehouse as well as
a gallery.
And so he would have exhibitions
at the warehouse.
And in '68, he did one of these
demonstrations-- that's the one
you're looking at here--
at Leo Castelli's gallery.
And then the very last one he
did-- he did these over a few
years--
in '69, he did the final one.
And this was at the studio
of Jasper Johns.
At that time, Johns had a studio
in a former bank building
in Manhattan.
And so he did that one,
and this is the Jasper Johns
one.
This is the Leo Castelli
warehouse, this is the Jasper
Johns.
Now this one is not splashing so
much as casting, because when he
would throw enough lead,
it would harden.
And then you could--
very carefully but almost never
could you transport this stuff--
you could pull it off the wall.
And then you could arrange
these things as sculpture
on the floor.
So this is splashing,
and this is called Splash Piece,
but subtitled "casting."
This is the Castelli warehouse,
this is the Jasper Johns studio.
What he's thinking about here,
of course--
who is he thinking about,
as a painter?
Yeah, exactly, he's thinking
of Jackson Pollock.
You know, Pollock is throwing
down paint, splashing
and hurling and doing
all that sort of stuff.
And now he's going
to the same idea.
And he wants to have as rapid
an execution as the New York
School.
I can be as gestural and as
rapid as de Kooning,
or I can throw and hurl things
like Pollock,
et cetera, with the wall
to sort of mediate, the wall
or the floor,
whether it hits the juncture--
sometimes he has to be very
careful about the juncture.
Of course, lead is toxic.
So he's got to wear
a ventilator.
From here, we go to sort
of his breakthrough pieces.
And this leads from all
of the different verbs.
One of the verbs he writes down
is "to prop," prop something up
against something else.
And that leads to this series,
here.
This is a historic photograph
of the show
that he has at the Guggenheim
in 1968.
The exhibition was called Nine
Young Artists.
And this is where he debuts
his prop pieces, where he takes
pieces and just props them.
There are no welds, no joins,
no pins, no rivets.
He puts this against the wall,
props up this beam,
and that's the work, props this
on top of this, props
these against each other.
This is a later one that's
in the Art Institute of Chicago,
from 1969.
This one is actually called
Close Pin Prop.
Some people misspell it
as "clothes," "clothespin,"
but it's "close," C-L-O-S-E,
because Chuck Close was with him
when he made that.
It was actually named
for the artist, and some people
misspell it.
They think it's a "clothespin,"
but it's not.
So again, what we have here
is fundamental to Serra,
and to process, and post
minimalism.
It is what he calls contingency,
right?
This depends on this.
You know, I will do this if you
do that.
That's contingency.
We have a contract,
but it's contingent.
OK in this, he's saying,
this thing has to be propped
against this thing.
If this thing is gone,
this thing falls.
So these things
are contingent on each other.
And for him, that is the height
of process, also, because it is
so precarious and potentially
impermanent.
And I think he even likes
the idea that it could be even
violent or aggressive.
There's a certain aggression
to us when we approach
these works, in that sense.
Now this work, these works
are somewhat benign in the sense
that we can't get inside them.
This is against the wall,
this is propped.
We could walk under here.
You could do that.
I don't think you're going
to crawl in here.
But now the scale
of these things
begins to expand.
And again, he's
pioneering, much like Morris,
this idea of anti-form,
sculptures that challenge
the reductive quality
of minimalism.
He's got a lot of pieces coming
together.
It's not just one little thing.
So that gets us to things
like this.
Now here, we have to talk
a little bit--
the sculpture on the left
is called One Ton Prop,
subtitled "house of cards,"
from 1969.
It's four heavy [? Kortun ?]
steel plates, propped
against each other.
Like, you know, when you build
a house of cards you just
put the cards
against each other.
But this work is called Reading
Cones, from 1988.
This is 17 feet tall,
and it weighs 32 tons.
So I think he likes the fact
that his work has a certain edge
that is somewhat dangerous.
Which brings us to this.
This is our Richard Serra.
This is Five Plates Two Poles,
1971.
It is hot rolled steel.
The gross weight is 14.6 tons.
Each plate weighs 5,227 pounds,
and each pole weighs 1,500
pounds.
This is a series--
we have the Prop Series.
This is part of the series
called The Plate and Pole
Series, where he now has things
propped, but using polls,
like this.
Remember, back here?
This is a pole.
So this is kind
of the grandfather of what we're
looking at here.
Again, elaborates
on his interests and concerns
with weight and mass,
of propping, contingency, all
of these things.
Again, the whole work weighs
some 15 tons.
So there's nothing holding this
together.
There are no pins, rivets,
welds.
The poles have a little groove
that's cut in them,
where a piece will fit in,
and then everything else
is contingent.
They just lean
against each other.
Now the fact of the matter
is, despite what our guards will
tell you, he wants you to walk
through here.
And if you do that--
aside from children, I think we
should allow adults to walk
into this, but we don't.
Because then you see what he
wants to convey,
and that is this threat.
His work is very often hostile
to the viewer.
It's aggressive.
And when you walk into one
of these spaces, the idea,
the possibility that one
of these things
is going to fall on you
gives you a sense of living
in the moment.
That is what he wants.
He wants you to be hyper aware,
in that instant,
that my life could end right
now.
So it's a fascinating concept,
and he pushes this idea farther
and farther.
He has all
these different quotes
and things.
He says, in defense
of these kinds of works
with industrial materials
on a large scale,
he said at one time,
"Everything we choose in life
for its lightness soon reveals
its unbearable weight."
So in works like this,
that aspect is very important.
And that is very different.
That kind of a contingency
is very important.
So what happens?
Remember the location down here,
near the auditorium?
But when we decided to flip
the way we view the building,
the concourse being the place
for special exhibitions--
and this had to be moved out.
So here it is.
This is when the engineers,
structural engineers,
have to come, riggers, people
who work on oil rigs and things,
who are specialists
in disassembling
this kind of thing,
and putting plywood
on the floor, of course,
not to the damage the floor,
and then dismantling
it and taking it
up a particular elevator,
a particular freight elevator
that we have.
This, in itself, when I watched
it--
I took these photographs-- was
really quite something to see.
Once we get it up--
the first thing, before you even
start dismantling it,
where are we putting it?
OK, we're going to put it
on the ground floor.
Will the floor support it?
If we put it up there
and the floor caves in,
that's not good.
So before we even moved it,
we had to have
structural engineers come and do
a study for the ground level
floor,
to see if it could support
a 5,000 pound work.
And they said it could.
So here's it being reassembled,
now, up where
its present location is.
And there it is now,
in that corner.
But this work, it is certainly
not site specific, right?
In other words, Serra didn't
create it for that space
downstairs,
and that's the only place
it could be.
The last great controversy with
Richard Serra-- and this leads
to one of the other great trials
in law, when you study art law--
is Tilted Arc.
So this was the big scandal
in 1981.
So this was
a controversial piece
of public art
that was installed by Serra.
It was placed in the Foley
Federal Plaza in Manhattan
from 1981 to 1989.
It consisted of a 120 foot long,
12 foot high,
solid, unfinished plate of rust
covered Cor-Ten steel.
This is a term you should know,
"Cor-Ten," C-O-R-T-E-N.
Cor-Ten steel
is the favorite steel for most
artists who work on this scale.
You don't have to give it
a patina or anything.
You put it outside, it rusts.
And it will rust naturally
to have this beautiful, kind
of velvety, almost,
kind of surface to it.
So this was installed, as you
see it here on the left
and on the right, in the plaza.
And then it just became
the locus of so much
controversy-- people
who worked in these buildings,
who had to go through this plaza
every day, who hated the work.
So there were public hearings
that were held about the work,
what can we do, should we remove
it,
should we change it, all
of these different things.
There was a public hearing
in which people got to testify
and kind of cast the vote.
And 122 people testified
in favor of keeping
the sculpture,
and 58 in favor of removing it.
So, actually, many people wanted
to keep it.
But there were many arguments
that were raised.
Some of them was, quote, "We run
the risk of deflecting
explosions into government
buildings opposite,
and that it impeded
adequate surveillance
of the area beyond."
People were upset that people
could vandalize it,
that people could put graffiti
on it.
People would urinate against it,
all these different things.
And if you were working
in this site day by day,
people got really sort of upset.
So we had exactly what we had
in the Brown [? Cousy ?] trial,
in the [? Whistler ?]
[? Ruskin ?] trial.
We had artists coming in favor,
artists coming against,
to testify.
Those who testified in favor
of the sculpture, Philip Glass,
Claes Oldenburg, Keith Haring--
there were a number of art
historians.
They even had a psychiatrist
come and testify.
The people who were most
against it were the kind
of people who worked
in the buildings
and the local workers who argued
for its removal.
And one person said, very
famously, this, "Every time
I pass this so-called sculpture,
I just can't believe it.
The General Services
Administration, or whoever
approved this--
this goes beyond the realm
of stupidity.
This goes into even worse
than insanity.
I think an insane person would
say, how crazy can you be to pay
$175,000 for that rusted metal
wall?
You would have to be insane,
more than insane."
So that was a lot of testimony,
along those lines.
So now it went to a jury.
It was a trial,
it went to a jury.
It was a five person jury,
and it was voted four to one
against the sculpture,
to remove it.
Now this caused the lawsuit
from Serra.
Because Serra's point was,
this had been a commission.
It had been commissioned
for this space.
It had been commissioned
specifically for this plaza,
with its dimensions and location
and everything else.
I'm going to make a sculpture
for that space.
This is
a site-specific sculpture.
It can go nowhere else.
If you remove it
from this space, you destroy it.
So that's what he argued.
He argued, this
is the great test case
for site-specific public
sculpture.
And we had another trial,
and people coming in arguing
about pro and con.
He lost, he lost the case.
So it was removed.
First it was dismantled,
in pieces.
And this was done in the dead
of night--
sort of like when the Baltimore
Colts left Baltimore--
so that nobody would get upset.
And this was done on March 15,
1989.
First, it was taken to a parking
lot in Brooklyn.
And then, eventually, it
was removed to where it is now,
which is in Maryland.
It's in a storage space
in Maryland.
It's Serra's wish, once
that happened,
that it was removed, that it
never be displayed anywhere else
other than this location here,
because it is site specific.
So while the work is safe--
sort of like my Claes Oldenburg
story in Cleveland-- but this
is worse.
So it sits in a warehouse,
it's not going to go anywhere
else.
It's certainly safe,
but we're never going to see it.
Now what was the upshot
of this trial?
Well, it led to the Visual
Artist Rights Act of 1990.
And so, in some ways,
Serra won the case.
The Visual Artist Rights Act
of 1990 granted certain rights
to artists that related to what
happens to their sculpture,
even after they have given it
to somebody,
or sold it to somebody,
or a commission has purchased
it.
In other words,
you could still--
I sell you a painting, one
of my paintings,
you decide to burn it.
Well, I have rights, even
though I've sold you
the painting and you own it.
That shouldn't happen.
So that leads to having the work
altered, even when it leaves
the possession of the artist.
Where this law just came
to be employed again, recently--
I don't know if you remember
this, I don't even know what
the situation is now, myself--
you know the big bull on Wall
Street?
You know, an artist made that,
obviously.
It's a big bronze sculpture.
And then somebody put
a little girl.
The artist who made the bull
sued on the basis of this Visual
Artist Rights Act,
that this other person had
affected his art by putting
this statue of the little girl
there, and had forever altered
his sculpture.
It gave his sculpture
a completely different meaning
than what it was originally
supposed to be there for.
If I'm not mistaken--
I'd have to go back and check--
he lost that case, though.
I think he lost that case.
So public sculpture
is a whole other thing.
When we talk
about public sculpture,
you can talk about two kinds
of sculpture, site specific,
like this, and then it's
a question of what will happen
if the people don't like it
or whatever.
This is the case with a lot
of Calder sculptures.
Every city has a Calder
and, you know, they just go up,
and down, and everywhere.
Every city has a Henry Moore
somewhere, that kind of thing.
There's a famous story
about the Calder
that's in Grand Rapids,
because it had a similar thing.
It's called Grande Vitesse,
Great Speed, and that was
initially commissioned
by the city for the plaza
in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Calder created it,
put it in place, the city hated
it.
Everybody complained, oh my god,
it's abstract, what is it,
it's a big yellow thing,
you know, this, that,
and the other thing--
red, sorry-- all of that.
And so then there were--
what Grand Rapids did
is a very smart thing.
They had a kind of, well, let's
talk about it, you know?
Let's have an education, let's
have some hearings,
let's have people talk about,
or let the artists talk
about it, et cetera.
And it was this--
you know, it's not so bad, let's
keep it.
Now it's on everything.
It's on the sanitation trucks,
it's on the stationary.
It's the logo on the stationary.
Now everybody loves it,
now everybody loves it.
Here's another process piece,
Richard Long, who
is much like Morris.
This is the White Chapel's Slate
Circle.
Currently it's off view,
from 1981.
And these are his instructions
here, for how this work is to be
installed.
Long used to take these
appropriately long
walks through the landscape,
the British landscape.
He was a great lover of nature
in almost a kind of English,
romantic way.
And some people even think
he represents landscapes,
but he says that's not the case
at all.
And he creates these circles,
as we have here.
They're are simple forms,
there's a circle.
And then they're made up
of individual pieces,
straight lines, spirals,
et cetera, that sort of speak
to his movements
across the landscape.
So these are slate stones that
came from an English quarry.
And they have to be arranged
in a certain--
he gives you a certain-- you
have to draw the circle.
But within the circle,
these can be installed
in a myriad of different ways,
and he's fine with it.
In fact, you're going to have
pieces leftover, and that's OK.
As long as you maintain
this dimension, this diameter,
you can put the things any way
you want.
So each time we install this,
we install it a slightly
different way.
But this is the general sketch
and description that he gives
us, in terms of how it should be
installed.
The last person I want to talk
about is Eva Hesse We have
this work, now up, which
is the test piece
for Contingent.
This is a photograph of Eva
Hesse.
It's undated.
Her archives now are at Oberlin
College, at the Allen Memorial
Art Museum.
Of course, she's a tragic figure
because she dies tragically
young at the age of 34
from a brain tumor.
She's in this room, now.
This is the Contingent Test
Panel next to Richard Tuttle
and Salvatore Scarpita, here,
so two other, sort of, fabric
pieces.
She's very much a part of post
minimalism.
And she creates this.
This is a test panel for a work
that's in Australia.
This is the work.
So what we have is her studio
test panel here,
that was preserved.
So it makes no sense
in some ways, because by itself
it doesn't function
as a processed minimalist work
as it does when you see
the actual work that's
at the National Gallery of Art
in Canberra.
So Contingent, 1969, and this
is made of latex
over cheesecloth, here.
She's born in Hamburg, Germany.
She has a horrible sort of life.
Her family flees Germany
to escape Nazi persecution.
She is placed in an orphanage,
temporarily, in Amsterdam.
Then they fetch her back
and they go to New York.
She studies at Pratt and Cooper
Union.
She eventually graduates
from Yale.
She's coming of age in the '60s.
She becomes very
fascinated with the materials,
and with a very anti formal,
anti minimalist aesthetic, where
as everything in minimalism that
is hard, formal, impersonal, is
for her personal,
variable, and very,
in some ways, emotive.
So what you do when you-- here,
this is the difference.
This is the difference.
So in her piece, what she's
doing is she's creating--
first of all, these are not
industrial product materials
that come from a factory.
She's sewing, she's touching,
she's fabricating,
she's making these things.
They have a sense of importance
to her, especially to her
as a female artist
and as a female in general.
They have an organic quality,
they speak to life.
They speak to change.
They speak to the human body.
Where minimalist works like this
by Judd are reflective,
her works are
transparent and light penetrates
through them, so they have,
almost, a sort
of spiritual quality.
Everything that's regular,
and formulaic,
and severe about the Judd piece
is open, and sensitive,
and variable in the works of Eva
Hesse.
She is very
important at this stage, where
she is in a post minimalist
idea of process,
but with a very different feel,
certainly very
different than Richard Serra.
And the tragedy is that she dies
at the age of 34.
She literally drops
dead of a brain tumor,
and so what she might have done
is something we'll never fully
understand.
And with that, I think
that's enough.
Thanks, everybody.
