Sense and Nonsense (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Uni versity, 1964).

1. Rudolph Wittkower, ' Brunei 1eschi and Proportion in Perspective' , Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16 (1953) 275-91. In
this connection Panofsky writes, ' ... from the point of view of the Renaissance, mathematical perspective was not only a guarantee of
correctness but also and perhaps even more so, a guarantee of aesthetic perfection' .
2. Merleau-Ponty, 'Cezanne's Doubt', op. cit.
3. Merleau-Ponty, 'The Primacy of Perception' , op. cit.
4. See Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965); and 'Nolan and Caro',
Lugano Review (1965).
Rosalind Krauss, 'Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd', Artforum, 4: 9 (May 1966) 24-26.

Barbara ROSE ABC Art [1965]
'I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange
one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties... At any rate, in experimental art men are
given the exact specifications ofcoming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritants or technology... But the
counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.
1

- Marshall McLuhan, 'Understanding Media', 1964
1 How do you like what you have. This is a question that anybody can ask anybody. Ask it.' -GertrudeStein, 'Lectures in America',
1935
On the eve of the First World War, two artists, one in Moscow, the other in Paris, made decisions which radically altered the
course of art history. Today we are feeling the impact of their decisions in an art whose blank, neutral, mechanical impersonality
contrasts so violently with the romantic, biographical Abstract Expressionist style which preceded it that spectators are chilled
by its apparent lack of feeling or content. Critics, attempting to describe this new sensibility, call it 'cool art' or 'idiot art
1
or
'know-nothing nihilism'.
That a new sensibility has announced itself is clear, although just what it consists of is not. This is what I hope to establish
here. But before taking up specific examples of the new art, not only in painting and sculpture, but in other arts as well, I would
like briefly to trace its genealogy.
In 1913 Kasimir Malevich, placing a black square on a white ground which he identified as the 'void', created the first
Suprematist composition. A year later Marcel Duchamp exhibited, as an original work of art, a standard metal bottle rack, which
he called a 'readymade'. For half a century these two works marked the limits of visual art. Now, however, it appears that a new
generation of artists, who seem not so much inspired as impressed by Malevich and Duchamp (to the extent that they venerate
them) are
examining in a new context the implications of their radical decisions. Often the results are a curious synthesis of the two men's
work. That such a synthesis should be not only possible but likely is clear in retrospect. For, although superficially Malevich and
Duchamp may appear to represent the polarities of twentieth-century art-that is, on one hand, the search for the transcendent,
universal, absolute and in the other, the blanket denial of the existence of absolute values - the two have more in common than
one might suppose at first.
To begin with, both men were precocious geniuses who appreciated the revolutionary element in post-Impressionist art,
particularly Cezanne's, and both were urban Modernists who rejected the possibility of turning back to a naive primitivism in
disgusted reaction to the excesses of civilization. Alike, too, was their immediate adoption and equally rapid disenchantment
with the mainstream modern style, Cubism. Turning from figurative manners, by 1911 both were doing Cubist paintings, although
the provincial Malevich's were less advanced and 'analytic' than Duchamp's; by 1913 both had exhausted Cubism's possibilities as
far as their art was concerned. Moreover, both were unwilling to resolve some of the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in
Analytic Cubism in terms of the more ordered and logical framework of Synthetic Cubism, the next mainstream style. I say
unwilling rather than unable, because I do not agree with critic Michael Fried's view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed
Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution towards a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the
poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward towards an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational
Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so ennervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich's
Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp's rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many
of the most cherished premises of Western art in favour of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.
It is important to keep in mind that both Duchamp's and Malevich's decisions were renunciations - on Duchamp's part, of the
notion of the uniqueness of the art object and its differentiation from common objects, and on Malevich's part, a renunciation of
the notion that art must be complex. That the art of our youngest artists resembles theirs in its severe, reduced simplicity, or in
its frequent kinship to the world of things, must betaken as some sort of validation of the Russian's and the Frenchman's
prophetic reactions.

MORE IS LESS
The concept of' Minimal art', which is surely applicable to the empty, repetitious, uninfected art of many young painters,
sculptors, dancers and composers working now, was recently discussed as an aesthetic problem by Richard Wollheim.
1
It is
Professor Wollheim's contention that the art content of such works as Duchamp's found objects (that is, the 'unassisted
readymades' to which nothing is done) or Ad Reinhardt's nearly invisible 'black' paintings is intentionally low, and that resistance
to this kind of art
comes mainly from the spectator's sense that the artist has not worked hard enough or put enough effort into his art. But, as
Professor Wollheim points out, a decision can represent work. Considering as' M inimal art' either art made from common
objects that are not unique but mass-produced or art that is not much differentiated from ordinary things, he says that Western
artists have aided us to focus on 'specific objects' by setting them apart as the 'unique possessors of certain general
characteristics'. Although they are increasingly being abandoned, working it a lot, making it hard to do and differentiating it as
much as possible from the world of common objects formerly were ways of ensuring the uniqueness and identity of an art
object.
Similarly, critic John Ashbery has asked if art can be excellent if anybody can do it. He concludes that: ' What matters is the
artist's will to discover, rather than the manual skills he may share with hundreds of other artists. Anybody could have discovered
America, but only Columbus did.'
Such a downgrading of talent, facility, virtuosity and technique, with its concomitant elevation of conceptual power, coincides
precisely with the attitude of the artists I am discussing (although it could also apply to the 'conceptual' paintings of Kenneth
Noland, Ellsworth Kelly and others).
Now I should make it clear that the works I have singled out to discuss here have only one common characteristic: they may
be described as Minimal art. Some of the artists, such as Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Robert Huot, Lyman Kipp, Richard Tuttle, Jan
Evans, Ronald Bladen and Anne Truitt, obviously are closer to Malevich than they are to Duchamp, whereas others, such as
Richard Artschwager and Andy Warhol, are clearly the reverse. The dancers and composers are all, to a greater or lesser degree,
indebted to John Cage, who is himself an admirer of Duchamp. Several of the artists - Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre and
Dan Flavin - occupy to my eye some kind of intermediate position. One of the issues these artists are attacking is the applicability
of generalizations to specific cases. In fact, they are opposed to the very notion that the general and the universal are related.
Thus, I want to reserve exceptions to all of the following remarks about their work; in other words, some ofthe things I will say
apply only in some cases and not in others.
Though Duchamp and Malevich jumped the gun, so to speak, the avenue towards what Clement Creenberg has called the
'Modernist reduction', that is, towards an art that is simple, clear, direct and immediate, was travelled at a steadier pace by
others. Michael Fried points out that there is:
'A superficial similarity between Modernist painting and Dada in one important respect: namely that just as Modernist painting has
enabled one to see a blank canvas, a sequence of random spatters or a length of coloured fabric as a picture, Dada and neo-Dada
have equipped one to treat virtually any object as a work of art'.
2
The result is that 'there is an apparent expansion ofthe realm
ofthe artistic corresponding - ironically, as it were -to the expansion ofthe pictorial achieved by Modernist
Wittgenstein, whom I know a number ofthem have read. But none the less the rejection of the personal, the subjective, the tragic
and the narrative in favour ofthe world of things seems remarkable, even if or even because it is coincidental.
But neither in the new novels nor in the new art is the repudiation of content convincing. The elimination ofthe narrative
element in dance (or at least its suppression to an absolute minimum) has been one of Merce Cunningham's most extraordinary
achievements, and in this the best ofthe young choreographers have followed his lead. Although now, having made dance more
abstract than it has ever been, they all (including Cunningham in Story) appear to be reintroducing the narrative element
precisely in the form ofthe objects, which they carry, pass around, manipulate and so forth [... ]
That all this new art is so low-key, and so often concerned with little more than nuances of differentiation and executed in the
pianissmo we associate with, for example, Morton Feldman's music, makes it rather out of step with the screeching, blaring,
spangled carnival of American life. But if Pop art is the reflection of our environment, perhaps the art I have been describing is its
antidote, even if it is a hard one to swallow. In its oversized, awkward, uncompromising, sometimes brutal directness, and in its
refusal to participate, either as entertainment or as whimsical, ingratiating commodity (being simply too big or too graceless or
too empty or too boring to appeal) this new art is surely hard to assimilate with ease. And it is almost as hard to talk about as it is
to have around, because of the art that is being made now, it is clearly the most ambivalent and the most elusive. For the
moment one has made a statement, or more hopeless still, attempted a generality, the precise opposite then appears to be true,
sometimes simultaneously with the original thought one had. As Roger Shattuck says of Satie's music: 'The simplest pieces, some
ofthe humoristic works and children's pieces built out of a handful of notes and rhythms are the most enigmatic for this very reason:
they have no beginning, middle and end. They exist simultaneously'.
So with the multiple levels of an art not so simple as it looks.
5. Richard Wollheim, Arts Magazine (January 1965).
6. Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965).
3 Merce Cunningham, trans/formation, 1 (1952). Barbara Rose, 'ABC Art' , Art in America, 53: 5 (October-November 1965) 57-69; reprinted in Minimal Art:
A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968).

Robert MORRIS Notes on Sculpture: Part I
[1966]

'What comes into appearance must segregate in order to
appear.'
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There has been little definitive writing on present-day sculpture. When it is discussed it is often called in to support a broad
iconographic or iconological point of view
- after the supporting examples of painting have been exhausted. Kubler has raised the objection that iconological assertions
presuppose that experiences so different as those of space and time must somehow be interchangeable.
1
It is perhaps more
accurate to say, as Barbara Rose has recently written, that specific elements are held in common among the various arts today -
an iconographic rather than an iconological point of view. The distinction is helpful, for the iconographer who locates shared
elements and themes has a different ambition than the iconologist, who, according to Panofsky, locates a common meaning.
There may indeed be a general sensibility in the arts at this time. Yet the histories and problems of each, as well as the
experiences offered by each art, indicate involvement in very separate concerns. At most, the assertions of common sensibilities
are generalizations that minimize differences. The climactic incident is absent in the work of John Cage and Barnett Newman. Yet
it is also true that Cage has consistently supported a methodology of collage that is not present in Newman. A question to be
asked of common sensibilities is to what degree they give one a purchase on the experience ofthe various arts from which they
are drawn. Of course this is an irrelevant question for one who approaches the arts in order to find identities of elements or
meanings.
I n the interest of differences it seems time that some of the distinctions sculpture has managed for itself be articulated. To
begin in the broadest possible way it should be stated that the concerns of sculpture have been for some time not only distinct
from but hostile to those of painting. The clearer the nature ofthe values of sculpture become the stronger the opposition
appears. Certainly the continuing realization of its nature has had nothing to do with any dialectical evolution that painting has
enunciated for itself. The primary problematic concerns with which advanced painting has been occupied for about half a century
have been structural. The structural element has been gradually revealed to be located within the nature of the literal qualities
ofthe support.
2
It has been a long dialogue with a limit. Sculpture, on the other hand, never having been involved with illusionism
could not possibly have based the efforts of fifty years upon the rather pious, if somewhat contradictory, act of giving up this
illusionism and approaching the object. Save for replication, which is not to be confused with illusionism, the sculptural facts of
space, light and materials have always functioned concretely and literally. Its allusions or references have not been
commensurate with the indicating sensibilities of painting. If painting has sought to approach the object, it has sought equally
hard to dematerialize itself on the way. Clearer distinctions between sculpture's essentially tactile nature and the optical
sensibilities involved in painting need to be made.
Vladimir Tatlin was perhaps the first to free sculpture
from representation and establish it as an autonomous form both by the kind of image, or rather non-image, he employed and by
his literal use of materials. He, Aleksandr Rodchenko and other Constructivists refuted Cuillaume Apollinaire's observation that 'a
structure becomes architecture, and not sculpture, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature'. At least the
earlier works of Tatlin and other Constructivists made references to neither the figure nor architecture. In subsequent years
Naum Cabo, and to a lesser extent Maurice Pevsner and Georges Vantongerloo, perpetuated the constructivist ideal of a non-
imagistic sculpture that was independent of architecture. This autonomy was not sustained in the work ofthe greatest American
sculptor, the late David Smith. Today there is a reassertion ofthe non-imagistic as an essential condition. Although, in passing, it
should be noted that this condition has been weakened by a variety of works that, while maintaining the non-imagistic, focus
themselves in terms ofthe highly decorative, the precious or the gigantic. There is nothing inherently wrong with these qualities;
each offers a concrete experience. But they happen not to be relevant experiences for sculpture, for they unbalance complex
plastic relationships just to that degree that one focuses on these qualities in otherwise non-imagistic works.
The relief has always been accepted as a viable mode. However, it cannot be accepted today as legitimate. The autonomous
and literal nature of sculpture demands that it have its own, equally literal space - not a surface shared with painting.
Furthermore, an object hung on the wall does not confront gravity; it timidly resists it. One ofthe conditions of knowing an
object is supplied by the sensing ofthe gravitational force acting upon it in actual space. That is, space with three, not two,
coordinates. The ground plane, not the wall, is the necessary support for the maximum awareness ofthe object. One more
objection to the relief is the limitation ofthe number of possible views the wall imposes, together with the constant of up, down,
right, left.
Colour as it has been established in painting, notably by Jules Olitski and Morris Louis, is a quality not at all bound to stable
forms. Michael Fried has pointed out that one of their major efforts has been, in fact, to free colour of drawn shape. They have
done all this by either enervating drawing (Louis) or eliminating it totally (recent Olitski), thereby establishing an autonomy for
colour that was only indicated by Jackson Pollock. This transcendence of colour over shape in painting is cited here because it
demonstrates that it is the most optical element in an optical medium. It is this essentially optical, immaterial, non-containable,
non-tactile nature of colour that is inconsistent with the physical nature of sculpture. The qualities of scale, proportion, shape,
mass, are physical. Each of these qualities is made visible by the adjustment of an obdurate, literal mass. Colour does not have
this characteristic. It is additive. Obviously things exist as coloured. The objection is raised against the use of colour that
emphasizes the optical and in so doing subverts the physical. The more neutral hues, which do not call attention to themselves,
allow for the maximum focus on those essential physical decisions that inform sculptural works. Ultimately the consideration
ofthe nature of
sculptors I'm considering (Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin) have all used standard units interchangeably. Again, the
reference is back to the Russians - particularly to Rodchenko in Andre's case - but still, another element has insinuated itself,
preventing any real equations with Constructivist sculpture.
It is hard to make more specific remarks without incurring Boss Tweed's criticism. So rather than guess at intentions or look
for meanings I prefer to try to surround the new sensibility, not to pin-point it. As T.E. Hulme put it, the problem is to keep from
discussing the new art with a vocabulary derived from the old position. Though my end is simply the isolation ofthe old-
fashioned Zeitgeist, I want to go about it impressionistically rather than methodically. I will take up notions now in the air which
strike me as relevant to the work. As often as possible I will quote directly from texts that I feel have helped to shape the new
sensibility. But I do not want to give the impression that everything I mention applies indiscriminately to all the artists under
consideration. Where I do feel a specific cause and effect relationship exists between influences ofthe past and these artists'
work, I will illustrate with examples [... ]
A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE: REPETITION AS RHYTHMIC STRUCTURING
1
... the kind of invention that is necessary to make a
general scheme is limited in everybody's experience, every time one ofthe hundreds of times a newspaper man makes fun of my
writing and of my repetition he always has the same theme, that is, if you like, repetition, that as if you like the repeating that is
the same thing, but once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing, there can be no repetition because the essence of
that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while
anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.'
- Gertrude Stein, Portraits and Repetition, Lectures in America, 1935
_ 'Form ceases to be an ordering in time like ABA and J reduces to a single, brief image, an instantaneous whole o both fixed
and moving. Satie's form can be extended only by reiteration or "endurance". Satie frequently scrutinizes a very simple musical
object; a short unchanging ostinato accompaniment plus a fragmentary melody. Out of this sameness comes subtle variety.'
- Roger Shattuck, 'The Banquet Years', 1955

In painting, the repetition of a single motif (such as Larry Poons' dots or Gene Davis
1
stripes) over a surface usually means an
involvement with Jackson Pollock's all-over paintings. In sculpture, the repetition of standard units may derive partly from
practical considerations. But in the caseofjudd's, Morris', Andre's and Flavin's pieces it seems to have more to do with setting up
a measured, rhythmic beat in the work. Judd's latest sculptures, for example, are all reliefs made of a transverse metal rod from
which are suspended, at even intervals, identical bar or box units. For some artists - for example, the West
Coast painter Billy Al Bengston, who puts sergeants' stripes in all his paintings-a repeated motif may take on the character of a
personal insignia. Morris'four identical mirrored boxes, which were so elusive that they appeared literally transparent, and his
recent L-shape plywood pieces were demonstrations of both variability and interchangeability in the use of standard units. To
find variety in repetition where only the nuance alters seems more and more to interest artists, perhaps in reaction to the
increasing uniformity ofthe environment and repetitiveness of a circumscribed experience. Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, silk-
screen paintings ofthe same image repeated countless times and films in which people or things hardly move are illustrations
ofthe kind of life situations many ordinary people will face or face already. In their insistence on repetition both Satie and
Gertrude Stein have influenced the young dancers who perform at thejudson Memorial Church Dance Theater in New York.
Yvonne Rainer, the most gifted choreographer ofthe group (which formed as a result of a course in dance composition taught by
the composer Robert Dunn at Merce Cunningham's New York dance studio) has said that repetition was her first idea of form: '/
remember thinking that dance was at a disadvantage in relation to sculpture in that the spectator could spend as much time as he
required to examine a sculpture, walk around it and so forth - but a dance movement - because it happened in time - vanished as soon
as it was executed. So in a solo called The Bells performed at the Living Theater in 1961,1 repeated the same seven movements for
eight minutes. It was not exact repetition, as the sequence ofthe movements kept changing. They also underwent changes through
being repeated in different parts of the space and faced in different directions - in a sense allowing the spectator to "walk around
it".'
For these dancers, and for composers like La Monte Young (who conceives of time as an endless continuum in which the
performance of his Dream Music is a single, continuous experience interrupted by intervals during which it is not being
performed) durations of time much longer than those we are accustomed to are acceptable. Thus, for example, an ordinary
movement like walking across a stage may be performed in slow motion, and concerts ofthe Dream Music have lasted several
days, just as Andy Warhol's first film, Sleep, was an 8-hour-long movie of a man sleeping. Again, Satie is at least a partial source. It
is not surprising that the only performance of his piano piece, Vexations, in which the same fragment is ritualistically repeated
840 times, took place two years ago in New York. The performance lasted 18 hours, 40 minutes and required the participation in
shifts of a dozen or so pianists, of whom John Cage was one. Shattuck's statement that 'Satie seems to combine experiment and
inertia' seems applicable to a certain amount of avant-garde activity ofthe moment.
ART AS A DEMONSTRATION: THE FACTUAL, THE CONCRETE, THE SELF-EVIDENT ' But what does it mean to say that we cannot
define (that is, describe) these elements, but only name them? This might mean, for instance, that when in a limiting case a
complex consists of only one square, its description is simply the name ofthe coloured square.
'There are, of course, what can be called "characteristic experiences" of painting to (e.g.) the shape. For example, following
the outline with one's finger or with one's eyes as one points - But this does not happen in all cases in which I "mean the shape",
and no more does any other one characteristic process occur in all these cases.' -Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'Philosophical
Investigations', 1953

If Jasper Johns' notebooks seem a parody of Wittgenstein, then Judd's and Morris' sculptures often look like illustrations ofthat
philosopher's propositions. Both sculptors use elementary, geometrical forms which depend for their art quality on some sort of
presence or concrete thereness, which in turn often seems no more than a literal and emphatic assertion of their existence.
There is no wish to transcend the physical for either the metaphysical or the metaphoric. The thing, thus, is presumably not
supposed to 'mean' other than what it is; that is, it is not supposed to be suggestive of anything other than itself. Morris
1
early
plywood pieces are all of elementary structures: a door, a window-frame, a platform. He even did a wheel, the most rudimentary
structure of all. In a dance he made called Site, he mimed what were obviously basic concepts about structure. Dressed as a
construction worker, he manipulated flat plywood sheets ('planes', one assumes) until finally he pulled the last one away to
reveal behind it a nude girl posed as Manet's Olympia. As I've intimated, Morris' dances seem to function more as explications du
texte of his sculptures than as independent dances or theatrical events. Even their deliberately enigmatic tone is like his
sculpture, although he denies that they are related. Rauschenberg, too, has done dances which, not surprisingly, are like three-
dimensional, moving equivalents of his combined constructions and are equally littered with objects. But his dance trio called
Pelican for two men on roller-skates and a girl in toe-shoes has that degree of innovation and surprise which characterizes his
best paintings.
ART AS CONCRETE OBJECT
'Now the world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It simply is... In place ofthis universe of "meanings" (psychological, social,
functional), one should try to construct a more solid, more immediate world. So that first of all it will be through their presence
that objects and gestures will impose themselves, and so that this presence continues thereafter to dominate, beyond any theory
of explication that might attempt to enclose them in any sort of a sentimental, sociological, Freudian, metaphysical or any other
system of reference.' -Alain Robbe-Grillet, 'Unevoie pour leromanfutur
1
, Pour un Nouveau Roman, 1956
Curiously, it is perhaps in the theory ofthe French objective novel that one most closely approaches the attitude of many ofthe
artists I've been talking about. I am convinced that this is sheer coincidence, since I have no reason to believe there has been any
specific point of contact. This is quite the contrary to their knowledge of
providing the condition for a set of responses, large-sized objects exhibit size more specifically as an element. It is the more
conscious appraisal of size in monuments that makes for the quality of'scale
1
. The awareness of scale is a function ofthe
comparison made between that constant, one's body size and the object. Space between the subject and the object is implied in
such a comparison. In this sense space does not exist for intimate objects. A larger object includes more ofthe space around itself
than does a smaller one. It is necessary literally to keep one's distance from large objects in order to take the whole of any one
view into one's field of vision. The smaller the object the closer one approaches it and, therefore, it has correspondingly less of a
spatial field in which to exist for the viewer. It is this necessary greater distance ofthe object in space from our bodies, in order
that it be seen at all, that structures the non-personal or public mode. However, it is just this distance between object and subject
that creates a more extended situation, for physical participation becomes necessary. Just as there is no exclusion of literal space
in large objects, neither is there an exclusion ofthe existing light.
Things ofthe monumental scale, then, include more terms necessary for their apprehension than objects smaller than the
body, namely, the literal space in which they exist and the kinesthetic demands placed upon the body.
A simple form like a cube will necessarily be seen in a more public way as its size increases from that of our own. It accelerates
the valence of intimacy as its size decreases from that of one's own body. This is true even if the surface, material and colour are
held constant. In fact it is just these properties of surface, colour, material, that get magnified into details as size is reduced.
Properties that are not read as detail in large works become detail in small works. Structural divisions in work of any size are
another form of detail. (I have discussed the use of a strong Cestalt or of unitary-type forms to avoid divisiveness and set the
work beyond retardataire Cubist aesthetics in 'Notes on Sculpture: Part I', above.) There is an assumption hereof different kinds
of things becoming equivalent. The term 'detail' is used here in a special and negative sense and should be understood to refer to
all factors in a work that pull it towards intimacy by allowing specific elements to separate from the whole, thus setting up
relationships within the work. Objections to the emphasis on colour as a medium foreign to the physicality of sculpture have also
been raised previously, but in terms of its function as a detail a further objection can be raised. That is, intense colour, being a
specific element, detaches itself from the whole ofthe work to become one more internal relationship. The same can be said of
emphasis on specific, sensuous material or impressively high finishes. A certain number of these intimacy-producing relations
have been gotten rid of in the new sculpture. Such things as process showing through traces ofthe artist's hand have obviously
been done away with. But one of the worst and most pretentious of these intimacy-making situations in some ofthe new work is
the scientistic element that shows up generally in the application of mathematical or engineering concerns to generate or inflect
images. This
may have worked brilliantly for Jasper Johns (and he is the prototype for this kindofthinking) in his number and alphabet
paintings, in which the exhaustion of a logical system closes out and ends the image and produces the picture. But appeals to
binary mathematics, tensegrity techniques, mathematically derived modules, progressions, etc., within a work are only another
application ofthe Cubist aesthetic of having reasonableness or logic for the relating parts. The better new work takes
relationships out ofthe work and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer's field of vision. The object is but one
ofthe terms in the newer aesthetic. It is in some way more reflexive because one's awareness of oneself existing in the same
space as the work is stronger than in previous work, with its many internal relationships. One is more aware than before that he
himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and
spatial context. Every internal relationship, whether it be set up by a structural division, a rich surface or what have you, reduces
the public, external quality of the object and tends to eliminate the viewer to the degree that these details pull him into an
intimate relation with the work and out ofthe space in which the object exists.
Much ofthe new sculpture makes a positive value of large size. It is one ofthe necessary conditions of avoiding intimacy.
Larger than body size has been exploited in two specific ways: either in terms of length or of volume. The objection to current
work of large volume as monolith is a false issue. It is false not because identifiable hollow material is used - this can become a
focused detail and an objection in its own right - but because no one is dealing with obdurate solid masses and everyone knows
this. If larger than body size is necessary to the establishment of the more public mode, nevertheless it does not follow that the
larger the object the better it does this. Beyond a certain size the object can overwhelm and the gigantic space ofthe room itself
is a structuring factor both in its cubic shape and in terms ofthe kinds of compression different sized and proportioned rooms can
affect upon the object-subject terms. That the space of the room becomes of such importance does not mean that an
environmental situation is being established. The total space is hopefully altered in certain desired ways by the presence ofthe
object. It is not controlled in the sense of being ordered by an aggregate of objects or by some shaping ofthe space surrounding
the viewer. These considerations raise an obvious question. Why not put the work outside and further change the terms? A real
need exists to allow this next step to become practical. Architecturally designed sculpture courts are not the answer nor is the
placement of work outside cubic architectural forms. Ideally, it is a space without architecture as background and reference that
would give different terms to work with.
While all the aesthetic properties of work that exists in a more public mode have not yet been articulated, those which have
been dealt with here seem to have a more variable nature than the corresponding aesthetic terms of intimate works. Some ofthe
best ofthe new work, being
more open and neutral in terms of surface incident, is more sensitive to the varying contexts of space and light in which it exists.
It reflects more acutely these two properties and is more noticeably changed by them. In some sense it takes these two things
into itself as its variation is a function of their variation. Even its most patently unalterable property - shape - does not remain
constant. For it is the viewer who changes the shape constantly by his change in position relative to the work. Oddly, it is the
strength ofthe constant, known shape, the Gestalt, that allows this awareness to become so much more emphatic in these works
than in previous sculpture. A baroque figurative bronze is different from every side. So is a 183-cm [6-ft] cube. The constant shape
ofthe cube held in the mind but which the viewer never literally experiences, is an actuality against which the literal changing,
perspective views are related. There are two distinct terms: the known constant and the experienced variable. Such a division
does not occur in the experience ofthe bronze.
While the work must be autonomous in the sense of being a self-contained unit for the formation ofthe Gestalt, the indivisible
and undissolvable whole, the major aesthetic terms are not in but dependent upon this autonomous object and exist as unfixed
variables that find their specific definition in the particular space and light and physical viewpoint ofthe spectator. Only one
aspect of the work is immediate: the apprehension ofthe Gestalt. The experience ofthe work necessarily exists in time. The
intention is diametrically opposed to Cubism with its concern for simultaneous views in one plane. Some ofthe new work has
expanded the terms of sculpture by a more emphatic focusing on the very conditions under which certain kinds of objects are
seen. The object itself is carefully placed in these new conditions to be but one of the terms. The sensuous object, resplendent
with compressed internal relations, has had to be rejected. That many considerations must betaken into account in order that the
work keep its place as a term in the expanded situation hardly indicates a lack of interest in the object itself. But the concerns
now are for more control of and/or co-operation ofthe entire situation. Control is necessary if the variables of object, light, space,
body are to function. The object itself has not become less important. It has merely become less se//-important. By taking its
place as a term among others the object does not fade off into some bland, neutral, generalized or otherwise retiring shape. At
least most ofthe new works do not. Some, which generate images so readily by innumerably repetitive modular units, do
perhaps bog down in a form of neutrality. Such work becomes dominated by its own means through the overbearing visibility
ofthe modular unit. So much of what is positive in giving to shapes the necessary but non-dominating, non-compressed presence
has not yet been articulated. Yet much ofthe judging of these works seems based on the sensing ofthe Tightness ofthe specific,
non-neutral weight ofthe presence of a particular shape as it bears on the other necessary terms.
The particular shaping, proportions, size, surface of the specific object in question are still critical sources for the particular
quality the work generates. But it is now not
sculptural surfaces is the consideration of light, the least physical element, but one that is as actual as the space itself. For unlike
paintings, which are always lit in an optimum way, sculpture undergoes changes by the incidence of light. David Smith in the Cubi
works has been one ofthe few to confront sculptural surfaces in terms of light. Piet Mondrian went so far as to claim that:
'Sensations are not transmissible, or rather, their purely qualitative properties are not transmissible. The same, however, does not
apply to relations between sensations... Consequently only relations between can have an objective value...'
This may be ambiguous in terms of perceptual facts, but in terms of looking at art it is descriptive ofthe condition that obtains. It
obtains because art objects have clearly divisible parts that set up the relationships. Such a condition suggests the alternative
question: could a work exist that has only one property? Obviously not, since nothing exists that has only one property. A single,
pure sensation cannot be transmissible precisely because one perceives simultaneously more than one property as parts in any
given situation: if colour, then also dimension; if flatness, then texture, etc. However, certain forms do exist that, if they do not
negate the numerous relative sensations of colour to texture, scale to mass, etc., do not present clearly separated parts for these
kinds of relations to be established in terms of shapes. Such are the simpler forms that create strong Gestalt sensations. Their
parts are bound together in such a way that they offer a maximum resistance to perceptual separation. In terms of solids, or
forms applicable to sculpture, these Gestalts are the simpler polyhedrons. It is necessary to consider for a moment the nature of
three-dimensional Gestalts as they occur in the apprehension ofthe various types of polyhedrons. In the simpler regular
polyhedrons, such as cubes and pyramids, one need not move around the object for the sense ofthe whole, the Gestalt, to occur.
One sees and immediately 'believes' that the pattern within one's mind corresponds to the existential fact ofthe object. Belief in
this sense is both a kind of faith in spatial extension and a visualization ofthat extension. In other words, it is those aspects of
apprehension that are not coexistent with the visual field but rather the result ofthe experience of the visual field. The more
specific nature of this belief and how it is formed involve perceptual theories of'constancy of shape', 'tendencies towards
simplicity', kinesthetic clues, memory traces and physiological factors regarding the nature of binocular parallax vision and the
structure ofthe retina and brain. Neither the theories nor the experiences of Gestalt effects relating to three-dimensional bodies
are as simple and clear as they are for two dimensions. But experience of solids establishes the fact that, as in flat forms, some
configurations are dominated by wholeness, others tend to separate into parts. This becomes clear if the other types of
polyhedrons are considered. In the complex regular type there is a weakening of visualization as the number of sides increases. A
sixty-four-sided figure is difficult to visualize, yet because of its regularity one senses the whole, even if seen from a single
viewpoint. Simple irregular polyhedrons, such as beams, inclined planes, truncated
pyramids, are relatively more easy to visualize and sense as wholes. The fact that some are less familiar than the regular
geometric forms does not affect the formation of a Gestalt. Rather, the irregularity becomes a particularizing quality. Complex
irregular polyhedrons (for example, crystal formations), ifthey are complex and irregular enough, can frustrate visualization
almost completely, in which case it is difficult to maintain one is experiencing a Gestalt. Complex irregular polyhedrons allow for
divisibility of parts in so far as they create weak Gestalts. They would seems to return one to the conditions of works that, in
Mondrian's terms, transmit relations easily in that their parts separate. Complex regular polyhedrons are more ambiguous in this
respect. The simpler regular and irregular ones maintain the maximum resistance to being confronted as objects with separate
parts. They seem to fail to present lines of fracture by which they could divide for easy part-to-part relationships to be
established. I term these simple regular and irregular polyhedrons 'unitary' forms. Sculpture involving unitary forms, being
bound together as it is with a kind of energy provided by the Gestalt, often elicits the complaint among critics that such works
are beyond analysis.
Characteristic of a Gestalt is that once it is established all the information about it, qua Gestalt, is exhausted. (One does not,
for example, seek the Gestalt of a Gestalt.) Furthermore, once it is established it does not disintegrate. One is then both free
ofthe shape and bound to it. Free or released because ofthe exhaustion of information about it, as shape, and bound to it because
it remains constant and indivisible.
Simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience. Unitary forms do not reduce relationships. They
order them. If the predominant, hieratic nature ofthe unitary form functions as a constant, all those particularizing relations of
scale, proportion, etc., are not thereby cancelled. Rather they are bound more cohesively and indivisibly together. The
magnification of this single most important sculptural value - shape -together with greater unification and integration of every
other essential sculptural value makes, on the one hand, the multipart, inflected formats of past sculpture extraneous, and on the
other, establishes both a new limit and a new freedom for sculpture.
7. 'Thus Strukturforschung presupposes that the poets and artists of one place and time are the joint bearers of a central pattern of
sensibility from which their various efforts all flow like radial expressions. This position agrees with the iconologi st' s , to whom
literature and art seem approximately interchangeable. ' George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962) 27.
8. Both Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried have dealt with this evolution. Fried's discussion of 'deductive structure' in his catalogue
Three American Painters (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965) deals explicitly with the role of the
support i n painti ng.
Robert Morris, 'Notes on Sculpture: Part I', Artforum, 4: 6 (February 1966); reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New
York: E.P. Dutton &
Co. , 1968) 222-28.

Robert MORRIS Notes on Sculpture: Part II
[1966]
'Q. Why didn't you make it larger so that it would loom
over the observer?
A. I was not making a monument.
Q. Then why didn't you make it smaller so that the
observer could see over the top?
A. I was not making an object.'
-Tony Smith's replies to questions about his 183-cm [6-ft] steel cube
The size range of useless three-dimensional things is a continuum between the monument and the ornament. Sculpture has
generally been thought of as those objects not at the polarities but falling between. The new work being done today falls
between the extremes of this size continuum. Because much of it presents an image of neither figurative nor architectonic
reference, the works have been described as 'structures' or 'objects'. The word structure applies either to anything or to how a
thing is put together. Every rigid body is an object. A particular term for the new work is not as important as knowing what its
values and standards are.
In the perception of relative size the human body enters into the total continuum of sizes and establishes itself as a constant
on that scale. One knows immediately what is smaller and what is larger than himself. It is obvious, yet important, to take note
ofthe fact that things smaller than ourselves are seen differently than things larger. The quality of intimacy is attached to an
object in a fairly direct proportion as its size diminishes in relation to oneself. The quality of publicness is attached in proportion
as the size increases in relation to oneself. This holds true so long as one is regarding the whole of a large thing and not a part.
The qualities of publicness or privateness are imposed on things. This is because of our experience in dealing with objects that
move away from the constant of our own size in increasing or decreasing dimension. Most ornaments from the past, Egyptian
glassware, Romanesque ivories, etc., consciously exploit the intimate mode by highly resolved surface incident. The awareness
that surface incident is always attended to in small objects allows for the elaboration of fine detail to sustain itself. Large
sculptures from the past that exist now only in small fragments invite our vision to perform a kind of magnification (sometimes
literally performed by the photograph) that gives surface variation on these fragments the quality of detail it never had in the
original whole work. The intimate mode is essentially closed, spaceless, compressed and exclusive.
While specific size is a condition that structures one's response in terms ofthe more or less public or intimate, enormous
objects in the class of monuments elicit a far more specific response to size qua size. That is, besides
the expanded bronzes from the casts, are meaningless. DonaldJudd Now wait a minute. The point is not whether one makes a
work oneself or not. The point is that it's all a case of technique that makes the thing visible, so that I don't see in the long run
why one technique is any more essentially art than another technique. And there are presumably an infinite number of
techniques. I don't see why someone shouldn't go out and find the one that suits him, whether or not it conforms to the
manipulatory technique that's been going on for some time or to a new one.
Rose Here is the crucial question: whether an abstract aesthetic conception which may be manufactured or fabricated is as much
art as the personal manipulation of materials. I think the heart of most ofthe objections to the new work is that people feel that
since they can't see the artist's fingerprints, it's not a personal statement. Robert Morris I think that's a ridiculous issue, and I don't
think whether you fabricate it yourself or have somebody fabricate it for you has anything to do with making art. My interest is
in having the work as well executed as possible
[]
Judd Mark is defining space as something that is moved by the forms. If it isn't moved, if it's static, then, according to his
definition, it isn't really space. But that space that is shifted around or activated in one way or another is not what interests me.
DiSuvero The people who change space through a new sense of scale are the ones I dig the most. Giacometti certainly does it,
although he has to use the figure. But he actually changes the size ofthe space. Judd I hate that kind of space and purposely avoid
it, because it's an anthropomorphic kind of space [... ] Rose To go on to another point, Hilton Kramer listed what he believes were
the precedents for the new sculpture in the works ofthe Constructivists, Naum Gabo, Georges Vantongerloo, Alexander Calder,
David Smith and Louise Nevelson. I don't agree thattheir work has any kind of direct relationship to the new sculpture, except
perhaps in the scale of Calder's and Smith's works or in their relative simplicity. The roots ofthe new work, it seems to me, lie more
specifically in painting, in that it grows out of a dissatisfaction with the limitations of painting. I know, for example, that Don and
Bob were both originally painters. Let me ask you then, why did you stop painting and start making sculpture?
Morris I couldn't say. I stopped painting and I didn't do anything for two years and then I started making sculpture. So I don't feel
that there's any connection between the two.
Judd I became very tired of several major aspects of painting and felt that I couldn't do anything I would ever like with any of
them. In the first place, I was tired ofthe fact that it's a rectangle, and in the second, that it's so many inches from the wall, and
that no matter what you do you have to put something within the shape ofthe canvas. For example, if you put a series of circles
within the canvas, that leaves all that border around the circles. On the other hand, if you decide you want to emphasize the
rectangularity of the canvas, then you have to use elements that enforce it, that is, correspond to the edges in
some way. That really leaves you no choice. And also, paintings are invariably canvas. And I'm very tired of that particular surface,
and of oil paint too. So it seemed a good thingtogiveup. Painting seemed very restricted. No matter what you did you couldn't
make it strong enough and clear enough. So there was nothing to do but quit on it. Apropos of sculpture, I never took sculpture
as a model, although I was impressed, not influenced exactly, but pushed somewhat by quite a few people, for example by Lee
Bontecou and John Chamberlain, who at one time I thought did stronger work than I could possibly do. And one ofthe reasons I
stopped painting at the same time was that Oldenburg's work was much stronger than anything I could possibly make in a
painting. So the new developments in sculpture don't exactly amount to a revolution. It didn't come overnight, I think it's had a
pretty normal development. And you don't want to get saddled with a lot of people who are supposed to have influenced you
who didn't influence you. For example, even though I admired Smith's work, I never seriously considered it as an influence. But
Kramer mentions that Smith's last show was an influence. Now chronologically that's impossible, because it was last year, and
everybody was pretty well along in what they were doing by then, so Smith's late pieces could not have been an influence. In
fact, sculpture always looked archaic to me. It always had the kind of space Mark talked about, and it always had related forms
and a certain hierarchy of parts - the major part, the minor part and so forth. These were things I wasn't interested in and which I
certainly was trying to get away from in painting.
Rose But that's what I mean about painting being a primary source for a number ofthe ideas in the new sculpture. For example, the
elimination of internal compositional relationships was accomplished in painting by Pollock and Newman. That is why I feel the
antecedents for the new sculpture can be found in painting ratherthan in sculpture.
Judd Yes, but I'd say at least for myself that those antecedents are extremely general, and that they mostly concern scale. Almost
everybody assumes that broad scale is desirable now. Nearly all the best works have it.
Kynaston McShine How about the Russian Constructivists. Were you interested in their work? Morris No, I never paid any attention
to it. The first sculptures I made were a portal and a column. I copied both forms directly out ofthe Zoser complex in Egypt. Judd I
think everybody considered Constructivism, neo-Plasticism and Cubism past history by the time Bob and I were developing our
work. Piet Mondrian was dead and gone and an Old Master when I thought about painting. Recent American painting seemed
much more actual. McShine In the new work, repetition is a very strong element. Why doyou thinkthis is so? Rose Repetition is a
method of structuring; rhythm is important to art. The three repeated diagonals in Ron Bladen's piece give a particular kind of
emphasis and the impressive sense of monumentality or static majesty, if you like.
McShine But it's not really static because part ofthe experience consists of just walking around it.
Rose Let's put it this way... the viewer moves but the forms don't leap or jump around. They remain, at least in comparison with
open welded or assembled work, relatively static. They really stand still. That's one ofthe big differences between Mark's position
and the new aesthetic. And the content ofthe new work is quite different from the more emotional and romantic content of earlier
work.
Judd Mark states that sculpture imitates movement in a way. You know, the gist of it is that a certain anthropomorphic attitude
runs through his work. One finds it not only in his work, but in the general history of art for the last several hundred years.
Although I like his work very much, I would object to this quality if I were doing it. Smith, too, I think does a great deal of alluding
to other things. The general structure even in the last pieces is rather figurative. He has a box there and a box there, which is very
relational and allusive. And that particular quality I find pretty unbelievable philosophically and pretty uninteresting. I'd like work
that didn't allude to other things and was a specific thing in itself which derived a specific quality from its form. But I think that
my work and Bob's work is art in the same sense that work has always been art. It intends to have a certain quality which deals
with what you think about the world, and whatever art is, and I don't think it is essentially any different than art has always been
in that respect. And it's certainly not impersonal, anonymous and all that sort of stuff. I'd rather stay clear ofthe word spiritual
since I don't like its old meaning. I think that a given thing creates an interesting space but that you don't need to set up a certain
amount of motion to make it interesting, that a surface in itself is interesting. You don't have to set a form at an angle and relate
something else to it. If you have a rectangle of a certain size and certain surface and material, and it has the quality you want,
then it's sufficiently interesting and you don't have to work it into some other context to make it interesting.
Di Suvero You talk about your art in a purely rational fashion while the formation of values, as you know excellently well, is not
based upon this rational cognizant sense. And when you talk about space, you're ignoringthe mathematical perception of space.
That space which we perceive is untrue. We've learned it, yet you're still operating in its terms. When you talk about my space
and say that it's suggestive, that is right. But that shows a weakness on my part because I think that space should be warped. And
the mere idea that man could not find one side of its infinite surface until the eighteenth century is incredible. This is knowledge
we must have like a part of our fingertips.
Judd Those kinds of things are very tricky in application to art. Art is not science, and whether it is behind science or not is a very
complicated question. If it's dealing with a specific scientific problem, certainly it's following, but on the whole it is not doing
that. Usually science is just a mine for technique. Nothing much else. DiSuvero They used to talk about the interchange between
art and science. I think that it meant something then and it still means something now. It's a special kind of approach to a
problem which is explorative. I mean in a
possible to separate these decisions, which are relevant to the object as a thing in itself, from those decisions external to its
physical presence. For example, in much of the new work in which the forms have been held unitary, placement becomes critical
as it never was before in establishing the particular quality of the work. A beam on its end is not the same as the same beam on
its side.
It is not surprising that some of the new sculpture that avoids varying parts, polychrome, etc., has been called negative,
boring, nihilistic. These judgements arise from confronting the work with expectations structured by a Cubist aesthetic in which
what is to be had from the work is located strictly within the specific object. The situation is now more complex and expanded.
Robert Morris, 'Notes on Sculpture: Part II', Art forum, 5: 2 (October 1966); reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. , 1968) 228-35.

Hilton KRAMER "Primary Structures": The New Anonymity
[1966]
Certain exhibitions usher us into the present in easy stages, educating our sensibilities to new and unexpected alternatives by
means of a careful expository logic that adjusts our expectations to each of the aesthetic and historical shocks that awaits us.
This is not the case with the new show called 'Primary Structures', which opened this week at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue
at 92nd Street. Here the transition from past - even the very recent past-to present is abrupt and precipitous. Confronting the
multitude of objects that comprise this exhibition, there is no mistaking the fact that we are in a realm of feeling and of ideas
utterly removed from the pieties and assumptions that have governed a good deal of Modern art. Everything about the works of
art included here-their scale, their materials, their radical renunciations - is a reminder that a new aesthetic era is upon us.
In calling the exhibition 'Primary Structures', the museum's Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Kynaston McShine, who
organized the show, discreetly refuses to identify it as a survey of sculpture. And there is good reason for this discretion: so much
of the work has such marked affinities with painting and architecture that, at first glance anyway, its strict sculptural identity
seems blurred. But only at first glance, I think. This is, for better or worse, an exhibition of new sculpture, and its interest lies in
the way it defines the new sculptural aesthetics.
Fundamental to this new aesthetics is an attitude of detachment and impersonality-an attitude that finds its proper
expression in forms and materials that do not require the intervention of the artist's hand; that may, in fact, be best executed by
mechanical means that do not permit the artist's hand to play any role whatever. Many of the artists included in the exhibition
actually do construct and paint or otherwise finish their work themselves, but the sculptural imagery they aspire to does not
require
them to do so. Their aims can be carried out so much better by workers professionally trained for the task. As Mr McShine
observes in his introduction to the catalogue, the sculptor can 'now conceive his work, and entrust its execution to a
manufacturer whose precision and skill convey the standardized "impersonality" that the artist may seek'.
In order to realize sculpture on this order, form must adhere to an extreme simplicity and regularity: geometricity will
naturally be favoured. The materials employed must be of an extreme anonymity: painted flat wood surfaces are widely used,
and sheet metal too, but the new industrially produced plastics, being even more impersonal than even the most slickly painted
surface, are clearly superior for the end in view. For what these new sculptors desire above all is to have their conceptions
embodied in a physical object that will function as an expressive visual statement while remaining completely barren of all
subjective involvement.
There are forty-two American and British sculptors included in the 'Primary Structures' exhibition-most of them young and
little known to the general public - and not all of them succeed in adhering to this impersonal ideal.
What remains important-what, indeed, assumes the greatest importance - are the logistics of form itself. There are sculptural
precedents for what the new sculptors are doing - precedents to be found in the work of Naum Gabo and Georges Vantongerloo
and Max Bill, in Alexander Calder and David Smith and Louise Nevelson - but these are less immediately relevant than the
inspiration that has been drawn from recent painting. In particular, hard-edge and Colour Field painting quite dominates both the
way colour is used and the physical scale of the structures themselves. One might say that the new sculpture is, in effect, a
species of abstract painting aspiring to the condition ofarchitecture: it is sculpture only because the sculptural medium is the sole
means by which this aspiration can be realized.
If one turns from the overall aesthetics of the' Primary Structures' show to the individual works that make it up, one cannot
help feeling that this is an exhibition stronger and more interesting in its general principles than in its specific accomplishments.
A good many works engage one's interest as demonstrations of theoretical possibilities, but then fail to sustain one's attention
as expressive entities in their own right. I cannot recall another exhibition of contemporary art that has, to the same extent, left
me feeling so completely that I had not so much encountered works of art as taken a course in them. One is enlightened, but
rarely moved [... ]
Hilton Kramer, '"Primary Structures": The New Anonymity' , New York Times (1 May 1966) 23.
Mark DI SUVERO. Donald JUDD. Kynaston MCSHINE.
Robert MORRIS. Barbara ROSE The New Sculpture [1966]
Barbara Rose [... ] I wanted to explain the appropriateness ofthe participation of Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Markdi Suvero in
this symposium. They were among the first to establish and make explicit new positions in sculpture which made possible some
ofthe developments this show has focused upon. In di Suvero's work there is a kind ofdynamictension of structural relationships
and a directness of impact that have influenced manyyoung sculptors, particularly those in the Park Place group. Morris was one of,
if not the first, to use simple unitary volumes rather than to make sculpture that depended on a relationship of parts. Several works
in the show by other artists derive directly from prototypes he executed in plywood from 1961-65 which were exhibited atthe
Green Gallery, and widely reproduced in photographs. In these works he used the room as a general environment for works which
related to floor, wall and ceiling in unprecedented ways. Judd was among the first to use identical or repeated elements and to
work with mathematical sequences, particularly those extendible to infinity. Like Morris, he too used simple volumes and non-
relational composition. I think it is important to point out how these three artists developed precedents which prepared the way
for the kind of work we're seeing now. Di Suvero's work, although more romanticthan the sculpture in the show, must be counted
as part ofthe general context in which it developed. And on that score, I want to ask Mark whether he agrees with Hilton
Kramerthatthe new sculpture is anonymous and impersonal, and whether he finds this objectionable, since it is an aesthetic
position opposed to his work.
Mark di Suvero I think'Primary Structures' is the key show of the 1960s, and that it has introduced a new generation of artists. As
for whether the work is anonymous, all work is anonymous that doesn't have any name. Some of it is beautiful. The Ron Bladen,
for example, is a great piece. It expands our idea of scale and really changes our knowledge of space. Some ofthe work presents
itself as manufactured object, and the very sense of objectness eliminates it from what I think is the most crucial part of modern
sculpture. I think that my friend Don J udd can't qualify as an artist because he doesn't do the work. And there is more and more
of this kind of thing, which to my mind is the negation ofthe object by making an object. But this is not grappling with the
essential fact that a man has to make a thing in order to be an artist. As far as I'm concerned, those works which give me that
sense of radiance which I find I need in a work are those that have been actually worked over by an artist. I think that all those
pointed-up bronzes, the pointed-up marbles,

HIGH MINIMALISM