Word: minimalistic
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...figure on a base); on the other, the use of droopy, cracked, hanging, bandaged, sprawled, repetitive and otherwise un-ideal forms as references to the human body, its vulnerability to age and gravity, its indelicate openness. Hesse's role in providing American art with an exit from the minimalist impasse was crucial. Her ambition was to go in below the level of style, making art whose sensuous appeal was obliterated by its coarse, laconic materials: latex, cheesecloth, scrap metal...
...this means we have two didactic artists under consideration-one Marxist and one non-Marxist with minimalist tendencies. Both are out to combat the oppressive bourgeois image of Man, which has pretensions to "universality" but in practice proves to be severely restrictive and paralyzing and mystifying-autocratic-in a class sense as well as in an existential sense. But how effective are these forms culturally (hence, politically) or politically (hence, culturally)? Do they eliminate "outmoded consciousness" and clarify "changing social relations" rooted in material conditions? Or do they merely reflect changing intellectual consciousness operating in isolation from social relations altogether...
...concept of art. There's Jackson Pollock, of course, who gave the physical making process so much more prominence than Mirko ever does. And there's Morris Louis, whose name and stripes of color are better known at Harvard than is Mirko. The action painter, the flat painter, the minimalist, the happening-creator, the sculptor of simple geometric forms at superhuman scale (Tony Smith, for one)--these are the fantastically novel stars...
...sneaky that their craftsmanship eludes the viewer altogether. Bruce Nauman, 26, at Manhattan's Leo Castelli Gallery last February, showed off crude fiber glass forms, limp latex-and-cloth sculptures, and a stuttering neon sign that proclaimed "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." Minimalist Morris blossomed forth at a Castelli spring show with billowing grey strips of industrial felt...
Abstraction is the dominant mode in the U.S. right now and accounts for approximately 50% of the paintings at the Whitney. How varied nonobjectiveness can be is illustrated by the op grids of Cleveland's Julian Stanczak as well as by the empty canvas of Manhattan Minimalist Robert Mangold, and the sheet of lacquered aluminum from Los Angeles' Billy Al Bengston (representative of what one Whitney curator dubbed California's "finish fetish"). But abstraction as an end in itself is on the wane. Artists everywhere are tending to combine it with figurative elements, or give their abstractions...