Specific objections: Yve-Alain Bois on Donald Judd in London and minimalism in New York and Los Angeles

ArtForum, Summer, 2004 by Yve-Alain Bois

Goldstein does attempt to offer a rationale in her catalogue essay, which begins with an excerpt of the 1967 article by John Perreault that lends its title to her show. In that text, Perreault asserts that Minimal art is a fad that will pass, "and just as most of the second-rate Pop artists have fallen by the wayside and the really good Pop artists continue to expand and develop their unique sensibilities, so too will all the minor Minimal artists, producing a boring glut of unimaginative, superficial variations on a worn out theme, sink to their just reward, leaving perhaps three or four major artists for the history books and for the younger artists to oppose, contradict, love and hate." Goldstein states that her exhibition "resists the limited trajectory for Minimalism that was suggested by Perreault." Fine, you think, this is going to be a revisionist account, rehabilitating the little guys (and girls) and revealing the many strategic manipulations that historically resulted in the canonization of a few big shots. This kind of argument rarely works, as Los Angelenos should well know for having long ago been submitted to a similar treatment of Cubism in Douglas Cooper's "The Cubist Epoch" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (clearly, the reputations of Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, and La Fresnaye did not benefit substantially from it). But why not give it a try? The show contains all the elements to offer a revisionist story in its greatest detail. For that, however, it would have had to rely on chronology as its organizing principle. Tedious, perhaps, but remarkably efficient and just as easy, when coming after James Meyer's formidable research in Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001). And if the show were to have been a historical, retrospective reckoning, its catalogue should have contained a year-by-year, month-by-month, illustrated account of group and individual shows, critical reviews, and artist's manifestos, rather than a simple list of exhibitions and an exacting--even masterful--bibliography that will be useful only to graduate students fishing for dissertation topics. (A model for the former genre still remains the Whitney's catalogue of its 1990 exhibition "The New Sculpture 1965-1975: Between Geometry and Gesture," a no-brainer to be sure--as one needs not be a genius to compose such an anthology--but by far the best textbook on this period of American art.)

Yet a chronological scenario is not the only possibility. Issues could have provided the guiding principles just as well. Here again Goldstein had secured all the material she would have needed to explore, say, the relation of Minimal to Conceptual art (a topic excellently covered by Anne Rorimer in the catalogue); or the vexing problem of gestalt, which the artists addressed in very conflicting ways, some, such as Morris, even changing their minds in midcourse (first gestalt was in, then it became the thing to kill); or the even more complex problem of anthropomorphism. Most Minimalists disagreed with Michael Fried's charge that a rampant anthropomorphism characterized their work--but what to make of McCracken's planks leaning against the wall, for example? Would it not have been useful to think about a typology of Minimalist productions with regard to their adherence to or rejection of this age-old measure of sculptural presence? The relation between painting and sculpture, the use of the grid or industrial material, anti-expressionism and its opposite, the attitude regarding mass culture or the market, the lure of dematerialization, etc. Each of these topics could have been the focus of a mini-section of the exhibition, and the viewer would at least have had some help in sorting out its riches. Instead, one witnessed an almost complete refusal to take a stand, a curatorial withdrawal never clearer than when dealing with works that were specifically conceived as attacks on the Minimalist agenda, however vague and full of contradictions it might have been. Because Hans Haacke's process works, such as his Condensation Cube, 1963-65, Blue Sail, 1964/65, and Ice Stick, 1966, are located in the middle of the show, it is impossible for anyone to perceive that they represented a major rebuttal of the Minimalists' dream of an autonomous object, and the same is true for Bruce Nauman's comic Platform Made Up of the Space Between Two Rectilinear Boxes on the Floor, 1966, or Richard Serra's Prop pieces.