Sense and Sensibility: Rachel Whiteread and (Post)Minimalism

Third Text, 1994

Australian Journal of Art, 1999

Art and Christianity, 2017

J.M. Ganteau et C. Reynier (eds.), Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Arts, 2007

Much of contemporary art appears caught between two seemingly incompatible imperatives, both of them of a mimetic nature: the urge to remain true to the depersonalized, alienated economy of surface affects on the one hand, and the compulsion to stay as close as possible to the epidermic truth of private experience on the other hand. Some artists choose to confront the standardization of hypermodern identity. It is the case of Andreas Gursky whose famed panoramic shots of oversized hotel lobbies, of the trading floors of stock exchanges, of Le Corbusier inspired anonymous buildings or of anonymous supermarkets all encapsulate the uncanny depersonalization of space in our late capitalist age: Atlanta (1996, 186 x 256 cm) features the dizzying stratified tiers of a luxury hotel patio, the floors and rows of room doors rising from the bottom to the top of the picture in a merciless, clonelike repetitiveness redolent of a prison-like atmosphere as much as of high life style; Chicago Board of Trade II (1999, 207 x 340 cm) is a digital montage of high angle shots of a trading floor creating the sensation one is caught in a 360°, all-encompassing perspective that leaves nothing outside, a neat allegory of the globalization of capitalism; Paris, Montparnasse (1993, 205 x 421 cm) is a wall to wall view of the grid-like façade of a building overlooking the high-tech Montparnasse station in Paris. Gursky's both overpowering and reticent images are exemplary of the double-edged impact of impersonality in contemporary art. By excluding human presence, by exemplifying over and over again how man has been marginalized and instrumentalized in our all urban world, they both function as a mute indictment of such a marginalization and also surreptitiously seem to play in the hands of this same process. Gursky's work has indeed been criticized for dubiously colluding with the corporate culture it insists it exposes. And one can indeed only wonder at the conciseness of the visual conceit which, in Paris, Montaparnasse, meets International Style on its own ground, that of geometrical, dehumanized isomorphism, that of hegemonic amnesiac indifference. Other artists have chosen, on the contrary, to reinvest the private sites of individual experience in order to elaborate a confessional idiom: American photographer Nan Goldin in her autobiographical exploration of the mishaps and traumas of life, British born video-artist Steve McQueen, especially in his 2001 silent film, Illuminer, showing a night shot of a deserted bed, itself a variation on Felix Gonzalez-Torres's series of posters which ten years before had allegorized the devastation and loss caused by the AIDS virus, Tracey Emin's public dramatization of her private life, especially in her igloo tent featuring the names of all her former lovers, as in a vast, clumsy emotional patchwork, Wolfgang Tillmans' intimate still lifes of objects taken from the fabric of his everyday life, English

Art Journal, 2021

In 1968, Judy Chicago worked on a number of dome-shaped sculptures, each consisting of three acrylic hemispheres arranged symmetrically on a square surface. Made with new industrial materials and techniques, works such as Iridescent Domes #2 and Bronze Domes fit within the formal-aesthetic discourse of Minimal art. During the 1970s, Chicago and feminist critics positioned these sculptures—characterized by round forms and evanescent colors—as unconscious expressions of what they conceived as a feminine sensibility, which they opposed to the angular and cold language favored by male, Minimalist artists. This article argues that Chicago’s dome-shaped works were protofeminist due to their associations not with traditionally female forms but with contemporary engineering structures. I show that Chicago’s hemispherical sculptures, and her Minimal art more generally, referenced civil engineering projects at the forefront of technological innovation that were thought to advance human society and improve living standards for all. I thus expand the concept of protofeminism beyond notions of radical subjectivity, as theorized for art made by women during the 1960s, to a broader sociopolitical attitude intent on building a more just world. Interpreting Chicago’s Minimalist sculptures within the historically specific context of engineering, however, associates them with Western ideologies of modern progress that since the late 1960s have been questioned, reformulated, or discarded. Indeed, from the perspective of second-wave feminism, these ideologies not only seemed out-of-date but morally objectionable. The article reveals both the promises and pitfalls of Chicago’s techno-aesthetic, protofeminist practice.

E.P. Dutton eBooks, 1968

who is already widely known for his stimulating anthology called THE NEW ART (Dutton Paperbacks, 1966), has collected in this volume twenty-eight enlightening essays by both critics and artists analyzing all aspects of the fascinating and very complex "Minimal Art" style now in full swing in the most advanced American painting and sculpture. In addition, over 170 photographs showing important Minimal works are included. In both text and picture, therefore, this unique anthology will be indispensable to all who wish to know more about the newest art in America.

Since its emergence as an aesthetic category in the mid-twentieth century, minimalism has been contentious amongst scholars of all forms of art. It has been alternately celebrated, questioned, and condemned by not only its critics, but also the artists whose works have been given the historical title “minimalist.” This article explores the emergence of minimalist music, examining its relation to the earlier “avant-garde” works of John Cage and other eclectic influences, such as jazz and Eastern music. In doing so, this article attempts to establish a broad understanding of the elements integral to minimalist music, with a special focus on the composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. The works of Riley and Reich are compared to the works of visual artists Barnett Newman and Sol LeWitt in order to highlight the pivotal elements of the minimalist aesthetic, including repetition, simplicity, and, to borrow Cage’s term, “Unfixity.” This article concludes that the minimalist compositions of the aforementioned composers ultimately demonstrate the integral characteristics of minimalism better than their visual counterparts, due to the temporal nature of music. However, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of contemplating visual and musical interpretations of minimalism together, as they are complimentary windows into this modern movement.

Proceedings of the European Society of Aesthetics, 2018

The Art Book, 2005

2003

Hedlin Hayden, M., 2003: Out of Minimalism: The Referential Cube. Contextualising sculptures by Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread. Written in English. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Figura Nova series 29. 282 pp. Diss., Uppsala University. ISBN: 91-554-5682-0.