American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960-1979 1032262680, 9781032262680

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American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960–1979

This volume reframes the development of US-American avant-garde art of the long 1960s—from minimal and pop art to land art, conceptual art, site-specific practices, and feminist art—in the context of contemporary architectural discourses. Susanneh Bieber analyzes the work of seven major artists, Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Mary Miss, who were closely associated with the formal-aesthetic innovations of the period. While these individual artists came to represent diverse movements, Bieber argues that all of them were attracted to the field of architecture—the work of architects, engineers, preservationists, landscape designers, and urban planners—because they believed these practices more directly shaped the social and material spaces of everyday life. This book’s contribution to the field of art history is thus twofold. First, it shows that the avant-garde of the long 1960s did not simply develop according to an internal logic of art but also as part of broader sociocultural discourses about buildings and cities. Second, it exemplifies a methodological synthesis between social art history and poststructural formalism that is foundational to understanding the role of art in the construction of a more just and egalitarian society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, architecture, urbanism, and environmental humanism. Susanneh Bieber is Assistant Professor in the School of Performance, Visualization  & Fine Arts and the School of Architecture at Texas A&M University.

Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the field of art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-level books focus on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality art history research. Egon Schiele and the Art of Popular Illustration Claude Cernuschi State Construction and Art in East Central Europe, 1918–2018 Edited by Agnieszka Chmielewska, Irena Kossowska, and Marcin Lachowski Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà and its Afterlives Lisa Rafanelli The Virtual Liturgy and Ritual Artifacts in Medieval and Early Modern Studies Katharine D. Scherff Whistler and Artistic Exchange between Japan and the West: After Japonisme in Britain Ayako Ono The Pictures Generation at Hallwalls: Traces of the Body, Gender, and History Vera Dika American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960–1979 Susanneh Bieber

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Art-History/ book-series/RRAH

American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960–1979

Susanneh Bieber

Designed cover image: Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument for Ellis Island: Frankfurter with Tomato and Toothpick, 1965 © Claes Oldenburg. Photo © The Israel Museum First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Susanneh Bieber The right of Susanneh Bieber to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bieber, Susanneh, author. Title: American artists engage the built environment, 1960–1979 / Susanneh Bieber. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022060425 (print) | LCCN 2022060426 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032262680 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032280516 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003295105 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art and architecture—United States—History—20th century. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—United States—History—20th century. | Art, American—20th century. | Architecture and society—United States—History— 20th century. Classification: LCC N72.A75 B53 2023 (print) | LCC N72.A75 (ebook) | DDC 709.73/0904—dc23/eng/20230227 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060425 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060426 ISBN: 978-1-032-26268-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-28051-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29510-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003295105 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Permissions Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys: Mary Miss

vi

x

xi

1

2. Constructing a Better World: From the Bauhaus to Postwar America

20

3. Twentieth-Century Engineering: Donald Judd and Robert Grosvenor

36

4. Monuments, Landmarks, and Ruins: Claes Oldenburg and

Robert Smithson

94

5. Idea as Model: Lawrence Weiner and Gordon Matta-Clark

154

6. Conclusion

213

Bibliography Index

219

245

Figures

1.1. Mary Miss, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (destroyed), 1978. 1.2. Mary Miss, study for underground structure in Perimeters/Pavilions/ Decoys, 1977. 1.3. Mary Miss, Grate, 1966. 1.4. Mary Miss, Untitled, 1973. 1.5. Bear Pit at Childs Frick’s Clayton Estate (today part of the grounds of the Nassau County Museum of Art), showing bear Prinny, c. 1920. 1.6. Mary Miss, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (destroyed), 1978, showing underground structure. 1.7. Mary Miss, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (destroyed), 1978, showing eighteen-foot tower. 1.8. Mary Miss, study for Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, c. 1977. 2.1. Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda III, 1913. 2.2. Gertrud Arndt, design for a carpet, Carpet 2, 1924. 2.3. Director’s office of Walter Gropius at Bauhaus Weimar, with carpet by Gertrud Arndt (1924), wall hanging by Else Mögelin (1923), office lamp by Wilhelm Wagenfeld (1923–24), and hanging lamp by Gerrit Rietveld (1920). 2.4. Jackson Pollock and Peter Blake with the model for an Ideal Museum by Peter Blake, 1949. 2.5. Peggy Guggenheim at home with Jackson Pollock in front of his Mural (1943), 155 East 61st Street, New York, 1946. 3.1. Othmar Ammann and Charles S. Whitney, Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, New York City, under construction, 1964. 3.2. Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 58), 1965. 3.3. Installation of Donald Judd’s work at the Green Gallery, New York, December 1963. 3.4. Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 39), 1963. 3.5. Thomas and William Wight, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (today known as the Nelson-Atkins Museum), Kansas City, Missouri, 1933. 3.6. Postcard featuring drawing of Watkins Mill by Lee Burwell (recto/ verso), sent by Donald Judd to Julie Finch, August 26, 1963. 3.7. Silos et élévateurs à blé aux États-Unis, from Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, rev. ed. (Éditions Vincent, Fréal, 1958).

2 3 8 9 11 12 13 14 21 22

23 29 30 36 38 41 42 42 43 44

Figures 3.8. Installation view of Twentieth Century Engineering, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1964, showing room with bridges. 3.9. Photomural of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam (today known as Dez Dam), Iran, 1963, installed in Twentieth Century Engineering, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1964. 3.10. Model of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam (today known as Dez Dam), ca. 1964. 3.11. Theodor Heuss Bridge, Düsseldorf, Germany, 1957, schematic drawing. 3.12. Turnbuckle and wire system of Donald Judd’s untitled (DSS 83), 1965. 3.13. Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 53), 1964. 3.14. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson (architects) with Severud Associates (structural engineering), Seagram Building, New York City, NY, 1958. 3.15. Robert Grosvenor, Transoxiana, 1965, with Topanga in the background, and paintings by Leo Valledor on the walls at the Park Place Gallery, 542 West Broadway, November 1965. 3.16. Robert Grosvenor, model for Topanga, 1965. 3.17. Robert Grosvenor, Niaruna, 1965. 3.18. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, designer Myron Goldsmith, McMathPierce Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona, 1962. 3.19. Section drawing of McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, ca. 1962. 3.20. View of Primary Structures, Jewish Museum, NYC, 1966, showing Robert Grosvenor’s Transoxiana, 1965 (destroyed), and Robert Morris’s Untitled (2 L’s), 1965 (destroyed ca. 1970). 3.21. Robert Grosvenor, Untitled (yellow), 1966; and Robert Grosvenor, Model for a Large Ceiling Piece, 1966. 3.22. Advertisement in Artforum for Robert Grosvenor exhibition at Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, June 7 to July 2, 1966. 3.23. Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 84), 1965. 3.24. Robert Grosvenor, Tenerife, 1966. 3.25. Robert Grosvenor, Untitled, 1972. 4.1. National Defense Reserve Fleet, Jones Point, Hudson River, ca. 1968. 4.2. Reserve Fleet Marker that commemorates the Hudson River National Defense Reserve Fleet at Jones Point, 1971. 4.3. G.W. Peters, New Building for the Immigrant Station, Ellis Island, New York Harbor—Boring & Tilton, Architects, 1898. 4.4. Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument for Ellis Island: Frankfurter with Tomato and Toothpick, 1965. 4.5. Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument for Ellis Island: Shrimp, 1965. 4.6. Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway, N.Y.C.—Block of Concrete, Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes, 1965. 4.7. Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, Paris, with car traffic and people walking in foreground, 1951. 4.8. Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square—Gearstick in Motion, 1966.

vii 49 49 50 52 55 57 61 62 62 64 65 67 70 72 73 74 78 82 97 98 100 102 103 105 107 108

viii

Figures

4.9. Artist’s rendering of an elevated Lower Manhattan Expressway, looking east towards Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, in Joint Study of Arterial Facilities, New York-New Jersey Metropolitan Area, 1955. 4.10. Claes Oldenburg, Placid Civic Monument, 1967. 4.11. Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace the Washington Obelisk, Washington D.C.—Scissors in Motion, 1967. 4.12. Plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, combining tunnel, opencut, and surface road, 1967. 4.13. Robert Smithson, The Bridge Monument Showing Wooden Sidewalks, photograph shot with an Instamatic 400 camera, from “The Monuments of Passaic,” 1967. 4.14. Robert Smithson, page from “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum, December 1967. 4.15. Port Authority Bus Terminal, 41st Street in Manhattan, New York, NY, 1950. 4.16. Othmar Ammann and Cass Gilbert, George Washington Bridge, 1931. 4.17. Robert Smithson, Negative Map Showing Region of the Monuments along the Passaic River, photostat used for “The Monuments of Passaic,” 1967. 4.18. Robert Smithson, The Sand-Box Monument (also called The Desert), photograph shot with an Instamatic 400, from “The Monuments of Passaic,” 1967. 4.19. Daniel D. Badger and John P. Gaynor, E. V. Haughwout & Company Building, 488–492 Broadway, New York City, NY. Photograph from 1970. 4.20. Robert Smithson, selected slides from Hotel Palenque, 1969/72. 4.21. Robert Smithson, Map of the Hotel Palenque, 1969. 4.22. The Palace at Palenque, Mexico, dating back to the fifth century CE. 4.23. Frederick Catherwood, floorplan of the Maya Palace, Palenque, Mexico. Reproduced in John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, volume 2, 1841. 5.1. Lawrence Weiner, A 36” × 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL, 1968. 5.2. Lawrence Weiner, cover and sample pages from Statements, 1968. 5.3. Sol LeWitt, “‘Ziggurats’: Liberating Set-Backs to Architectural Fashion,” Arts Magazine, November 1966; reprinted in exhibition catalog designed by LeWitt for his 1978 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 5.4. Harrison, Ballard & Allen, diagram illustrating the concept of floor area ratio (FAR), in Plan for Rezoning the City of New York, 1950. 5.5. Sol LeWitt, Serial Project #1 (ABCD), 1966. 5.6. Lawrence Weiner, A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND AT REGULAR INTERVALS TO FORM A RECTANGLE TWINE STRUNG FROM STAKE TO STAKE TO DEMARK A GRID A RECTANGLE REMOVED FROM THIS RECTANGLE, 1968.

109 113 116 118 120 123 124 126 129 130 133 136 138 140 142 155 157

160 161 164

167

Figures 5.7. Lawrence Weiner, AN AMOUNT OF PAINT POURED DIRECTLY

UPON THE FLOOR AND ALLOWED TO DRY, 1968. 5.8. Lawrence Weiner, AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH POURED UPON

A RUG AND ALLOWED TO BLEACH, 1968, installed in the

exhibition January 5–31, 1969. 5.9. Lawrence Weiner, A 36” × 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING

OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM

A WALL, 1968. 5.10. Lawrence Weiner, ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL

ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL, 1969. 5.11. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974. 5.12. Gordon Matta-Clark, drawings from sketchbook, 1971. 5.13. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting in progress, 1974. 5.14. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, interior view, 1974. 5.15. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, corner cut, 1974. 5.16. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting: Four Corners, 1974. 5.17. Gordon Matta-Clark, drawings from sketchbook, 1971. 5.18. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, corner perspective drawing for IIT Alumni

Memorial Hall (Navy Building), Chicago, IL, 1945. 5.19. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Englewood, NJ, 1929, sheet 36. 5.20. Zoning Map, City of Englewood, New Jersey, 1949. 5.21. Gordon Matta-Clark, foldout photomontage for 32-page book

Splitting, 1974. 5.22. Gordon Matta-Clark, photographs for Window Blow-Out, 1976. 5.23. Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Forum, 1974. 6.1. Mary Miss, sketchbook page, ca. 1978. 6.2. Mary Miss, sketchbook page, ca. 1978.

ix 168

171

176

179

182

184

185

186

188

189

190

190

193

194

197

201

202

215

216

Permissions

Parts of chapters three and four of this book are based on the following publications: “ ‘The Bulk of the Best Visible Things’: Judd’s Review of Twentieth Century Engineering at the Museum of Modern Art.” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 1 (Spring 2020). doi.org/10.24926/24716839.9742 “ Going Back to Kansas City: The Origins of Judd’s Minimal Art.” American Art 33, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 92–111. doi.org/10.1086/703713 “ To Become a Monument: Artworks by Claes Oldenburg and Robert Smithson.” In Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience, edited by Katrina Gulliver and Heléna Tóth, 59–79. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014.

Acknowledgments

When I first came to live in the United States, I hitchhiked through the country. On my journey many people generously helped me along the way, giving directions and taking me to their favorite sites. When I was back home, I cut a few sheets of paper into verti­ cal strips, glued them together into a long scroll, and wrote down the names of everyone I had met. I hung the scroll next to my working desk and read a few of the names every morning, remembering the various encounters. Writing this book was far more adventur­ ous than the trip I took years ago, and many more people enriched the journey from the initial ideas to printed book. First and foremost, I  thank the artists. Their work has challenged me to think and rethink what art is and can do. They opened up the world for me and continue to do so. I am immensely grateful to Mary Miss and Robert Grosvenor; and to Claes Oldenburg, and Lawrence Weiner, who have both recently passed. I extend my gratitude to the art­ ists’ families, estates, and representatives, including Jackie Grosvenor, Julie Finch, Patti Mucha, Alice Zimmerman, and Jane Crawford, and staff at the Judd Foundation, the Oldenburg & van Bruggen Studio, the Paula Cooper Gallery, the Holt/Smithson Founda­ tion, the Marian Goodman Gallery, the Lawrence Weiner Studio, the Gordon Matta-Clark Estate, and the David Zwirner Gallery. Phoebe Boatwright, MaryJo Marks, Ellie Meyer, Caitlin Murray, Emma Whelan, Andrea Walsh, Robbie McDonald, Lisa Le Feuvre, Wendy Owens, and Jacob Daugherty responded with verve and acuity to my many inquiries. I am immensely grateful to the guidance of Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon, Katherine Smith, Christine Filippone, and Kirsten Swenson. Their exemplary scholarship and com­ mitment to rethinking art history has been deeply inspirational for my own work. This book would not exist without their encouragement and insights. I extend my deep thanks to my professors at the Freie Universität Berlin, to my Doktorvater Gregor Stemmrich for his unwavering support and to Werner Busch, who gave me the first inkling that I could be a scholar. They taught me to think critically and work independently. The book has benefited enormously from insightful comments by James Housefield, Christopher Ketcham, Marcelo López-Dinardi, Matthew Levy, Emily Pugh, Robert Slifkin, Marion Thielebein, John Tyson, and Alan Wallach. Numerous interlocutors enriched my thinking and understanding of American art. I extend my heartfelt thanks to Miguel de Baca, Gra­ ham Bader, Stephen Caffey, Sophie Cras, Katarzyna Cytlak, Erica DiBenedetto, George Flaherty, David Getsy, Ann Goodyear, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Hiroko Ikegami, Donna Kacmar, Liz Kim, Antje Krause-Wahl, Rachel Middleman, Kalliopi Minioudaki, Kelly Montana, Bibiana Obler, Cory Pillen, Jennifer Roberts, Dawna Schuld, Julia Sien­ kewicz, Cherise Smith, Jenni Sorkin, Alex Taylor, Peggy Wang, and Jason Weems.

xii

Acknowledgments

Sections of this book were published as earlier versions. Editors and readers helped me refine my ideas and prose. I thank the jury for the 2017 Terra Foundation Interna­ tional Essay Prize at American Art, including Robin Veder, Erica Hirshler, and the late François Brunet, for their discerning comments on my manuscript “Going Back to Kan­ sas City: The Origins of Judd’s Minimal Art.” A research report on Judd’s turnbuckle boxes was published in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (Spring 2020), and sections from the fourth chapter appeared in Cityscapes in His­ tory: Creating the Urban Experience (Ashgate 2014). Insights from Emily Burns, Erin Pauwels, Katrina Gulliver, and Heléna Tóth helped me hone these manuscripts and thus my book. A postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum was essential for advancing my project and gave me access to relevant artworks, exhibition files, and archives. I learned an immeasurable amount from the intellectual community there and the cohort of fellows, who inspired me through their collegiality, knowledge, and dedica­ tion to archival research. I particularly thank Amelia Goerlitz, Anne Goodyear, Evelyn Hankins, Lisa Kirwin, and Virginia Mecklenburg. A  Tyson Scholar Fellowship at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art enabled me to study pertinent works of art and take a research trip to Kansas City. I am grateful to Margi Conrads, Mindy Besaw, and Chad Aligood for their guidance and hospitality. The ideas for this book germinated when I was working as a curator. During my stint as assistant curator at Tate Modern in London, I was inspired to think about art within architectural and urban contexts. Iwona Blazwick and Sheena Wagstaff, heads of the curatorial department, implemented groundbreaking programs; Donna De Salvo, Emma Dexter, Susan May, Frances Morris, and Sean Rainbird curated exciting and rich exhibi­ tions that have shaped my scholarship in countless ways. I am grateful to Sophie Clark, Adrian George, and Sophie McKinley, a closely knit team of assistant curators that made for a rich and exuberant experience. The research for this book took me to numerous archives, libraries, and museums. For their dedicated work, I sincerely thank all the staff members at these institutions, par­ ticularly at the Archives of American Art, the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, the Bauhaus Archiv, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Getty Research Institute, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Jewish Museum, the Judd Founda­ tion Archive, the Kunstbibliothek Berlin, the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, the Rachofsky Collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggen­ heim Museum of Art, the Sterling C. Evans Library, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. This publication and my research were generously supported by grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art and Texas A&M University, in particular the Academy for the Visual  & Performing Arts, the Institute of Applied Creativity, the Division of Research, and the Departments of Visualization and Architecture. The community here at Texas A&M University has impacted this book in numerous ways. I am deeply grateful to the deans of my college, my department heads, my men­ tors, and all of my colleagues for their continuous support of my research and teaching. Special thanks go to Dawn Jourdan, Carol LaFayette, Ergun Akleman, Phil Galanter, and Kevin Glowacki and to my students, who spur me on not only to convey ideas succinctly but to make them relevant for our contemporary times.

Acknowledgments

xiii

This book would not exist without the commitment of Isabella Vitti, Loredana Zed­ dita, Venkatesh Sundaram, and the professional staff at Routledge, Taylor & Francis, and Apex. I thank them for transforming my manuscript with skill, acumen, and dedication into its final published form. Dan Trujillo at ARS and Diana Edkins at Art Resource helped with many of the images. I am immensely grateful to Emily Campbell, Tom Fred­ erickson, Sabra Holton, Maki Iisaka, and Somaye Seddighikhavidak for their assistance with clearing copyright, editing, and tracing source material. My friends and family grounded me along this journey, listening patiently as I  re­ counted my travails and joys, getting me out on my bike, and reminding me that in the midst of all the work to be done, there is nothing more valuable than sitting down for Kaffee und Kuchen. I thank Emily, Anne, Greg, Joyce, Marion, Bärbl and James, Ed and Willie, and Beate, Moni, Steffi, Sylvie, and Solveig. I am fortunate to have Hannah and Catharina, my cousins, and my aunts and uncles. Most of all I am grateful for my par­ ents, Helga and Helmut, and their unfailing love and support, and for my partner, Chris, my most trusted companion on this journey.

1

Introduction Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys: Mary Miss

At the center of the field there was a square hole, sixteen feet across and seven feet deep. The hole was reached by a path that led through a wooded area and into the open field, where one saw what appeared to be no more than a thin incision in the distance. A ladder protruded from it, marking its location (Figure 1.1). Approaching the hole, wooden posts and beams became visible around the edge of the pit and led to the realization that it was part of a larger underground structure. Standing at the precipice of the hole, a visitor might debate whether to descend the ladder. What was the purpose of this structure? When was it built? And by whom? Climbing down the ladder, the visitor would lose sight of the landscape above and take in the earthen scent of the freshly incised ground. As they explored the underground structure, it became appar­ ent that the wooden posts and beams formed three concentric aisles around the perimeter of the hole (Figure 1.2). In the outermost aisle, vertical windows yielded a glimpse into dark hallways beyond. Where did these passageways lead? Like Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” this book be­ gins with a description of Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, an artwork that Mary Miss con­ structed on the grounds of the Nassau County Museum of Art on Long Island, New York, in the late 1970s.1 For Krauss, the work exemplified recent developments in sculp­ ture that incorporated the site and signaled the abandonment of the autonomous char­ acter of modern art. Her essay became a touchstone for art historians, critics, and artists who sought for art to play a more significant role in society beyond academia, the mu­ seum, and the gallery. While reasserting the continued relevance of Krauss’s ideas, Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose, the editors of the 2014 publication Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture, acknowledged that the art historical discourse that followed in Krauss’s wake had largely remained within the confines of fine art.2 American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960–1979 aims to expand the field of art history by drawing attention to architectural structures and practices that figured in the conception of avant-garde art of the 1960s. Miss’s Perimeters/Pavilions/ Decoys, for example, was inspired by a defunct bear pit located on the grounds of the Long Island museum. During the early twentieth century, the bear pit was part of a pri­ vate menagerie built by Childs Frick, the owner of what was then a private estate.3 After Frick’s death in 1965, Nassau County acquired the property and transformed it into a museum of fine art that opened its doors to the public four years later. While Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys has become an established part of the art histori­ cal canon, the bear pit has been forgotten. What might we gain from expanding the art historical field to recuperate such a vernacular structure? Does the meaning and impact of Miss’s work change when placed in the context of the once-functional bear pit? In DOI: 10.4324/9781003295105-1

2

Introduction

Figure 1.1 Mary Miss, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (destroyed), 1978. Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, New York. Source: © Mary Miss Studio. Photograph Mary Miss Studio.

the following pages, I focus on the work of American artists of the long sixties—Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Miss—arguing that they engaged with visual, material, and conceptual aspects of the built environment to more effectively participate in the construction of a better world. Artists at the time were attracted to the field of architecture—broadly understood to encompass the work of architects, engineers, preservationists, landscape designers, and urban planners—because these practices were thought to directly shape the social and material spaces of everyday life. This book does not focus on what is com­ monly referred to as “public sculpture,” even though a number of the artists discussed here created artworks for spaces outside the gallery, museum, or private home.4 Rather, I am interested in building visual, material, and conceptual equivalences between works of art and architectural discourses to sketch the contours of an intersectional history of form. How do forms create meaning and shape our world as they blur and transcend the boundaries between art, architecture, and the built environment? The book follows a loose chronological trajectory of canonical American avant-garde art from the early 1960s into the 1970s. The artists I address were all leading participants in the stylistic movements of the day: Judd became a main figure in minimal art, Gros­ venor represented the broader scope of the minimal style, Oldenburg was closely associ­ ated with pop art, Smithson’s name is synonymous with land art, Weiner was influential in the emergence of conceptual art, Matta-Clark’s work was paradigmatic for site-specific art, and Miss developed her practice within a feminist framework. Critics and historians

Introduction

3

Figure 1.2 Mary Miss, study for underground structure in Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, 1977. Pencil, colored pencil, and correction fluid on paper, 18¼ × 22¼ in. Museum of Mod­ ern Art, New York, gift of the Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Instruction Drawing Col­ lection, Detroit. Source: © Mary Miss  Studio. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

have used these movements to frame the development of avant-garde art during the long sixties; this story was long told as an expansion from narrow formalist to phenomeno­ logical and socio-critical concerns that considered viewers’ individual positions as well as larger economic and political contexts. While this narrative traced the shift from the autonomous object of modern art to the world beyond the white cube of the gallery, it re­ mained beholden to an internal and self-referential trajectory, whereby one style emerged in reaction to the preceding one. This book reframes the formal-aesthetic avant-garde of the long sixties in relation to buildings, cities, parks, and infrastructures. Previous studies—notably by Joshua Shannon and Cécile Whiting—have analyzed American art of the 1960s in the context of urban centers, namely New York City and Los Angeles, but this book is the first to explore the role architectural discourses played in the stylistic development of sixties avant-garde art and to posit that this engagement with the built environment was both formally and socially motivated.5 The long sixties witnessed far-reaching political and social upheavals that registered in the work of artists. The civil rights and Black Power movements, Chicano labor strikes, and the feminist and gay revolutions challenged the structure of a racist, classist, and sexist American society. Urban activists protested large-scale renewal projects that disproportionally destroyed the neighborhoods of lower-class African American and immi­ grant residents, while grassroots environmental efforts drew attention to the exploitative

4

Introduction

practices of large industries that destroyed natural habitats and ecosystems. At the same time, the US military involvement in Southeast Asia incited a generation of antiwar pro­ testors disenchanted with the government’s effort to spread a version of democracy that was frequently self-serving and imperialist. Numerous American artists actively partici­ pated in these revolutionary movements of the 1960s by drawing on the power of figura­ tive art to advocate for social, political, and environmental justice. Avant-garde critics all too frequently dismissed these artistic practices for their explicit political agendas and representational subject matter, which—owing to figurative art’s association with authoritarian regimes, be it the fascist Nazi government in Germany or Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union—they saw as propagandist and deterministic. This book does not focus on figurative or politically explicit art but aims to historicize and politicize the innovations of the formal-aesthetic avant-garde of the long sixties. To this end, I draw on the methodological strengths of social art history and poststructural formalism to develop an intersectional history of form. Since the 1970s, social art history, or the New Art History, has become the dominant paradigm for scholars intent on over­ turning, exploding, and decolonizing the Western art historical canon. Social art historians analyze art objects within historically specific and localized contexts to reveal art’s imbrica­ tion in hierarchical systems of power. They explore how conceptions of class, race, gender, sexuality, physical ability, or nationality have impacted the formation of the discipline of art history, and they show why certain artworks, objects, and practices were valued while others were marginalized and forgotten. Social art historians, however, tend to give short shrift to formal analyses, to the extent that art history is folded into (cultural) history. In their accounts, artworks often function as documents and are seen as symptomatic of the time and place in which they were made. What, then, does the art do in art history? In the 2021 volume The Present Prospects of Social Art History, Joshua Shannon suggests that “it is only through the reintroduction of form into the center of the social history of art that our discipline can make its full and proper contribution to history and the humanities.”6 Shannon brings into the fold the intellectual contributions of poststructural formal­ ism as developed in the pages of the influential journal October, founded by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson in 1976. Rather than writing microhistories to disrupt or sidestep the dominant narrative, the critics who gathered around October developed a new brand of formalism that sought to analyze works of art as structural propositions.7 Like social art historians, Octoberists rejected the devel­ opmental, positivist claims inherent to narratives of modernist art, but they continued to pay close attention to aesthetic innovations, understanding form itself as a means to question and upend the status quo. They ascribed critical, even revolutionary potential to formal innovations in art. Critics such as Krauss, Hal Foster, and Benjamin Buchloh thus positioned avant-garde art in opposition to bourgeois society and its ideologically complicit culture industry. The value of the avant-garde was lodged in its critical negativ­ ity. This concept required that advanced art be differentiated from visual and material culture, that art stand apart from architectural practices and the built environment.8 An intersectional history of form synthesizes the achievements of social art history and postrstructural formalism. It toggles between works of art and objects, structures, and practices that are part of everyday life, paying particular attention to how visual, material, and conceptual forms generate meaning within specific historical, cultural, and geographical contexts. This book is thus rooted in the practice of close looking, analyz­ ing the formal characteristics of the artworks at hand. By following artists’ interest in the built environment, the focus of the analysis shifts to the characteristics of buildings,

Introduction

5

towers, bridges, monuments, neighborhoods, zoning codes, urban and suburban spaces, and infrastructures; their materials and tectonics as well as their functions, impact, and significance for different segments of the population. I build visual, material, and con­ ceptual equivalences between works of art and the built environment—such as between the underground structure that Miss built as part of Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys and the nearby bear pit that served as an inspiration for her work. In Chapter 3, I compare the geometric sculptures of Judd and Grosvenor with innovative twentieth-century engineer­ ing feats such as bridges, highways, dams, and towers. In Chapter 4, I read the nominal monuments by Oldenburg and Smithson in formal equivalence to the making, desig­ nating, and preserving of national landmarks. And in Chapter 5, I focus on the art of Weiner and Matta-Clark to produce analogies between their practices and urban and ar­ chitectural planning. The narrative throughout develops along architectural themes and discourses and compares them to the innovations that defined the trajectory of the avant­ garde: minimal, pop, and land art, conceptual and site-specific practices, and feminist art. The formal equivalences between artworks and the built environment that I pursue are not meant to be deterministic. Rather they provide one reading that historicizes and politicizes the formal-aesthetic avant-garde. Scholars have interpreted the work of these artists within different pertinent sociopolitical contexts, such as the labor movement, the Vietnam War, the fear of nuclear annihilation, and the philosophy of pragmatism.9 At times, I  trace the artists’ knowledge of and interest in specific buildings, engineer­ ing feats, monuments, landmarks, infrastructures, and zoning codes through archival research; elsewhere these relationships remain more tenuous. Indeed, artists and critics of the 1960s as well as subsequent historians tended to obfuscate these equivalences—first because of an anxiety around representational modes in advanced modern art and second due to a fear of collapsing art and functional structures. Rather than being beholden to such long-held anxieties, this book delights in the formal play between abstraction and figuration, in uncovering visual ambiguities and material transformations. The multilay­ ered, even witty use of forms is evident in many of the discussed works, and a number of the artists explicitly encouraged and reveled in such slippages. Writing a book about canonical avant-garde artists, who are—for the most part— white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, and American, may seem to run counter to a radi­ cal art historical practice. Scholars who build on the rich legacy of feminist, queer, and decolonial discourses and critical race theory have exposed the mechanisms of power by which many artists were marginalized due to gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical ability, and aesthetic and stylistic preferences.10 It remains paramount that art historians recuperate the work of marginalized artists, assert the diversity of artistic practices, and thereby upend canonical narratives. Why, then, re­ visit the work of canonical avant-garde artists? What is it about their work that is still worth learning about today? This book is an effort to rethink the avant-garde trajec­ tory of 1960s art by pulling form out of its one-dimensional association with a narrow modernism, in which styles developed according to a self-referential logic. Instead, I understand forms in art as reverberating with the shapes, materials, and practices of everyday life. This book asks how the forms of sixties avant-garde art gain meaning in relation to the social and material spaces of people’s everyday lived experiences. Such an approach emphasizes the generative potential of forms across art, architecture, and the built environment. American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960–1979 opens with Miss’s Pe­ rimeters/Pavilions/Decoys even though it is chronologically situated at the end of the

6

Introduction

long sixties. I place it front and center not only because it became an iconic work in the formal-aesthetic narrative of the expanded field but even more so to position my narra­ tive within a decidedly feminist framework. The notion of constructing a better world as conceived by Miss’s male colleagues was rooted within heteropatriarchal epistemologies. As a woman artist interested in expanding her sculptural practice into large-scale works that approached the size of architectural structures, Miss had to battle gendered stereo­ types. Even more than the fine arts, the disciplines associated with designing buildings, cities, and infrastructures were dominated by white, heterosexual, cisgender men. Within patriarchal, capitalist societies, women were excluded from public and professional life and relegated to the private sphere of the home. Miss actively participated in the radical feminist art movement that emerged during the mid-twentieth century. Born in New York City in 1944, Miss returned to her home­ town after receiving her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1966 and then studying for her MFA at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art through 1968. In 1970 she joined the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee protesting the dismal representation of women artists at that year’s Whitney Annual.11 She was also a cofounder of the Heresies Collective, a group of women—among them artists Mary Beth Edelson, Harmony Hammond, Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, critic Lucy Lippard, and architect Susanna Torre—who came together in the mid-1970s. They published the first issue of the journal Heresies in January 1977, aspiring to expand the role of feminist art into the wider public sphere. In an editorial statement in the first issue, the twenty members of the collective, including Miss, stated: Heresies is an idea-oriented journal devoted to the examination of art and politics from a feminist perspective. We believe that what is commonly called art can have a political impact, and that in the making of art and of all cultural artifacts our identities as women play a distinct role.12 Left-leaning and social-democratic in its agenda, the Heresies Collective welcomed de­ bate and diversity. Its journal featured polemical and academic essays and poems along­ side original and reproduced artworks. Individual issues were devoted to such topics as communication (May 1977), lesbian art (fall 1977), and women’s traditional arts (spring 1978). Heresies was, as art historian Amy Tobin aptly described it, “an exemplar of the radical political challenge feminism posed to the art world and culture more broadly.”13 Despite her involvement with the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee and the Heresies Collective, Miss’s work has largely been absent from feminist scholarship. Feminist art histories pay particular attention to issues of gender, sexuality, and the body to critique heteropatriarchal structures of subjugation; they look beyond what during the 1960s and 1970s was a predominantly white, middle-class, heterosexual movement to consider various overlapping systems of oppression, including race, ethnicity, nationality, geog­ raphy, and physical ability, alongside more fluid conceptions of sex and gender. Femi­ nist art historians have paid relatively little attention to women artists who broached more decidedly male-dominated topics, media, and disciplines in their work—whether by employing new technologies and industrial materials; engaging with contemporary scientific discourses; or aspiring to shape the built environment on the scale of buildings, monuments, and cities.14 Recent writings on Heresies, for example, have highlighted the journals devoted to “Third World Women” (fall 1979) and “Racism Is the Issue” (sum­ mer 1982), while the spring 1981 issue on “Making Room: Women and Architecture”

Introduction

7

has received no attention. What is the significance of women getting actively involved in the architectural field and shaping material and social space? Is there more to be learned by examining the intersection of feminist art, architecture, and the built environment? During the long sixties, second-wave feminism contested the naturalized notion of woman in which the innate character of the female sex was construed as passive rather than active, emotional rather than rational, and associated with nature rather than cul­ ture. Feminists convincingly argued that the traditional definition of woman was socially constructed to serve heteropatriarchal structures of power. Feminist theorists distin­ guished between sex and gender to de-essentialize the definition of woman and thus expand discourses of sex from a biological to a political and cultural framing. Women artists of the long sixties intentionally depicted subject matter associated with the tradi­ tional realm of women and used craft media—such as sewing, knitting, and quilting—to insist on the equal value of these works. They also portrayed the female body, reclaiming it from the objectification of the male gaze and asserting women’s own right to erotic pleasure. These strategies have been at the center of feminist art history.16 Many women artists, however, were interested in using new materials and technol­ ogies, working on a larger scale, and seeking public commissions to participate more directly in the construction of a more just and egalitarian society. These efforts often depended on collaborations with industrial companies and frameworks of support that excluded women. In 1967, for example, Maurice Tuchman, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum, initiated a major art and technol­ ogy endeavor that gave artists the opportunity to work with industrial companies and thus create public, large-scale works, but he invited not a single woman to participate. In response, artists formed the Los Angeles Coalition for Women in the Arts, which pro­ tested the sexist policies of LACMA’s exhibition and collection program and demanded radical change.17 The development of Miss’s artistic practice—from sculpture to environmental instal­ lations and projects outside the museum—emerged as part of her overall feminist agenda that called for artists’ active participation in society. She and many other women artists, including her colleagues at Heresies, were interested in forging a feminist art that went beyond a symbolic, visual language and more directly and materially engaged the public sphere. Miss was troubled that the formal-aesthetic avant-garde continued to perpetuate a solipsistic trajectory of modernist art, which—even though self-critical—remained selfreferential. As Miss stated in a 2007 interview, 15

I have been trying to forge an alternative practice, one that allows artists to participate in the complex questions raised by working in the public realm. I am interested in how I, as an artist, can help shape the conversations in our culture rather than simply as­ suming the role of a commentator or critic.18 Miss created her first outdoor sculptures in 1966, including works such as Grate, in which she used short wooden beams to form a square border around a central metal grate (Figure 1.3). Temporarily placed in a public parking lot in Baltimore, the sculpture resembled a quasi-functional minimalist object. This was followed in 1968 by a number of outdoor works in which Miss employed ropes, including Stakes and Ropes in Colo­ rado Springs and Ropes/Shore for Wards Island in New York City. In 1973 she was com­ missioned to create a large temporary outdoor project for the Battery Park City landfill at the southern tip of Manhattan, which Lucy Lippard reviewed for Art in America. That

8

Introduction

Figure 1.3 Mary Miss, Grate, 1966. Wood and cast iron, 4 × 4 × 1.4 ft. Source: © Mary Miss Studio. Photograph Mary Miss Studio.

year she also traveled to Oberlin College in Ohio to create Untitled, a seven-foot-square pit, on the grounds of the college’s Allen Memorial Art Museum (Figure 1.4).19 The ideas of these works culminated in Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys of 1978. In her essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” Krauss tried to capture and theorize the new developments of avant-garde art: Over the last ten years rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: nar­ row corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.20 Highlighting environmental installations and outdoor projects by artists such as Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Alice Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, and Nancy Holt, alongside Miss’s Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, Krauss recognized that contempo­ rary sculpture was easily mistaken for architecture or landscape design. She framed these artworks, however, within a formal-aesthetic expansion of modern art rather than within explicitly political or feminist discourses. To this end, Krauss drew on Maurice Merleau­ Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which she had referenced as early as 1966 in her discussion of Donald Judd’s work in “Allusion and Illusion,” her review of the artist’s solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery. There she analyzed one of Judd’s minimal­ ist horizontal wall pieces, explaining how her expectation of the structural make-up of the work was foiled, as she, the viewer, changed her position vis-à-vis the sculpture. As

Introduction

9

Figure 1.4 Mary Miss, Untitled, 1973. Wood, 84 × 84 × 30 in. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio. Source: © Mary Miss Studio. Photograph Mary Miss Studio.

further discussed in Chapter  3, Krauss’s poststructural, phenomenological reading be­ came central to interpretations of minimal art that emphasized the relationship between artwork, viewer, and surrounding space and established minimal art’s central position in the shift from a modern positivist paradigm to a postmodern one.21 Krauss emphasized that the forms of a sculptural work changed according to the indi­ vidual’s point of view and thus challenged preconceived notions of the world. As subse­ quent critics and art historians—such as Anne Wagner and the contributors to Retracing the Expanded Field—have pointed out, perception for Krauss remained abstract and disembodied rather than immersed.22 Phenomenology was a theoretical tool rather than a lived, multisensory experience. Indeed, Krauss described the pit of Perimeters/Pavilions/ Decoys as having a “large square face,” a two-dimensional geometric form that regis­ tered in her mind’s eye as if she were seeing the work from an aerial point of view rather than from her position on the ground (or inside the pit).23 Even though she explored the spatial expansion of the two-dimensional shape into a three-dimensional environment, one that changed within a spatiotemporal context, her description could just as well have been based on a structural drawing of the work. She did not immerse herself in a

10

Introduction

subjective, bodily, or sensory experience; neither did she care where Perimeters/Pavilions/ Decoys was located or how it was made; nor, for that matter, did she address her own subject position as a white, heterosexual, cisgender woman. In her 2018 essay “The Skin of the Earth,” art historian Sarah Hamill advanced a feminist phenomenological reading of Miss’s work that accounts for the diversity of in­ dividual bodies and the precarity of sexualities.24 Her analysis focuses on Miss’s 1973 Untitled, the seven-by-seven-foot hole at Oberlin College, in which the artist obscured the depth of the excavation with three horizontal wooden trellises. (In 1975 these were refabricated in steel for a permanent version of the work.) Hamill compared the sculp­ ture to a camouflaged booby trap, such as those used by the Vietcong during the war in Southeast Asia, thus creating an analogy between Untitled and “the architectures and technologies of war, discipline, and state control.”25 Visitors were not able to physically step into the work; nevertheless, they could, perched at the edge of the pit, experience a sense of vulnerability and fear. Drawing on a feminist politics of precarity as theorized by Judith Butler, Hamill observed, “We are lured into the sculpture’s bodily otherness, and made to see its inner workings, as if our skin could be exchanged for another’s.”26 This psychological experience of undoing opens up the possibility of multiple and fluid subjectivities; it upends existing categories and hierarchies of gender and thus makes the phenomenological methodology productive for a decidedly feminist poststructural read­ ing, one that is subjective, contingent, and empathetic. The analogy between Untitled and a camouflaged booby trap transports the abstract, formal characteristics of the work of art from a subjective plurality into a political, collec­ tive realm. Similarly, my aim is to understand the formal characteristics of a work of art not only from contingent, precarious positionalities but through a collective framework, thus linking individual subjectivity and public responsibility. To this end, I produce for­ mal equivalences, toggling between avant-garde art of the long sixties and functional, vernacular structures of the built environment. I am just as interested in the sociopoliti­ cal meanings of avant-garde art as in the aesthetic and critical potentials of functional, ordinary structures that are part of people’s everyday lives. Ronald Onorato eloquently stated in a 1978 review of Miss’s work that the artist’s constructions “are the vehicle for drawing attention to a given, that is, the environment within which they are built.”27 Miss’s work allows us to see what has often been forgotten in narratives of avant-garde art that all too frequently have positioned aesthetic practices in opposition to, rather than in conversation with, objects and practices of everyday life. Shifting attention to and ana­ lyzing the vernacular structures that inspired Miss’s work not only upends the dichotomy between critical avant-gardism and ideologically compromised functional structures but also provides a deeper understanding of how forms across various disciplines generate meanings and impact the world. As noted, the underground structure of Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys was inspired by a defunct bear pit that Miss encountered when visiting the Nassau County Museum of Art in late 1977 to plan her commission (Figure 1.5). The main feature of the bear pit, constructed during the 1920s, was a sunken arena. The circular cast-concrete enclosure was about five feet deep and twenty feet in diameter. A chain-link fence mounted onto the concrete wall extended the enclosure by about another five feet above grade. The sunken pit had a recessed opening leading to a roofed pen for the bear’s retreat. The animal pit and Miss’s hole resembled each other formally and conceptually in that they are both excavations that embody a hierarchy between above ground and underground, between outside and inside. There are obviously also differences between the two works, not least

Introduction

11

Figure 1.5 Bear Pit at Childs Frick’s Clayton Estate (today part of the grounds of the Nassau County Museum of Art), showing bear Prinny, c. 1920. Source: Courtesy Martha Frick Symington Sanger.

that one was circular and the other was square, or that the former was built with con­ crete and metal fencing, while the latter was made with wooden posts and beams. I am not proposing that one is a literal replication or representation of the other. Rather, I am interested in considering the two structures as conceptual companions that mirror each other in their structural propositions.28 Childs Frick, a vertebrate paleontologist with an avid interest in zoology and botany, built the bear pit on his 145-acre Long Island property a few years after moving there with his wife and three daughters. His father, Henry Clay Frick, the renowned industri­ alist who made his fortune in the coke and steel business, had bought the property in Nassau County north of the Long Island town of Roslyn as a gift for Childs in 1919. In contrast to his father’s interest in industry and finance, Childs Frick pursued a career in the biological sciences. Born in 1883, he embarked on numerous expeditions, taking him to the western United States, East Africa, Ethiopia, and China. Interested in big-game hunting, he collected diverse specimens on his expeditions, many of which he donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he and other scientists further examined and studied the museum’s ever-growing holdings. By the 1920s Frick’s interest had turned to mammalian paleontology and fossil collecting, as well as to botany and horticulture. Moving to the Long Island property (christened Clayton Estate) allowed him to pursue these interests. There, he built a private zoo that included the bear pit along with an aviary and dens for reptiles. He devoted time to botanical experimentation,

12

Introduction

Figure 1.6 Mary Miss, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (destroyed), 1978, showing underground structure. Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, New York. Source: © Mary Miss Studio. Photograph Mary Miss Studio.

planting, for example, a pinetum of rare nonnative confers, ranging from dwarf species to twenty-foot-high trees, to test their adaptability to the local climate.29 Frick’s endeavors were rooted in a modern, humanist, Western worldview in which scientific observation and experimentation were central tenets that led to a deeper under­ standing of the world. His enlightened, scientific practice, however, was premised on a hierarchy between man and nature, whereby humans not only observed but also altered, cultivated, exploited, and subjugated the natural world. The bear pit, in particular, exem­ plifies the reigning positionality of humans vis-à-vis animals formally and conceptually in that the observing scientist stands in an elevated position while the animal entrapped below is the object of study. Miss’s work, by contrast, entices viewers to descend into the pit, surrendering their su­ perior position. Visitors become the object of observation as they enter the hole to explore the underground structure more closely, walking through the aisles that extend beyond the open pit and glancing through the windows in the outer wall, imagining and intuit­ ing a world beyond human knowledge and epistemes (Figure  1.6). Seeing Perimeters/ Pavilions/Decoys in equivalence to the locally and historically specific bear pit expands notions of human subjectivity into the more-than-human world. The work embodies the complex entanglement between humans, fauna, and flora and gives us a deeper under­ standing of how the notion of a responsible seeing that animates both structures have changed. Indeed, Prinny—the bear that lived on the estate—was not simply an object of scientific study but the pet of Childs Frick’s youngest daughter, Martha. Prinny frequently escaped her den, making her way beyond the estate’s boundaries to a beekeeper’s farm in Roslyn.30 In addition to the underground structure, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys included three towers. Located beyond a dirt embankment on the other side of the field, the towers were simple skeleton structures made of wooden poles, beams, and boards (Figure 1.7).31 Like

Introduction

13

Figure 1.7 Mary Miss, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (destroyed), 1978, showing eighteen-foot tower. Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, New York. Source: © Mary Miss Studio. Photograph Mary Miss Studio.

the pit, the towers were inspired by a vernacular, once-functional structure: a fire tower built on the grounds during the late nineteenth century.32 At the time, fire towers were a common safety feature of large estates, giving personnel an elevated position for the detection of forest fires. By the mid-1960s, however, fire towers had largely been rendered obsolete by the invention of aircraft and radios that facilitated communication between patrollers and respondents, thus presenting a more effective way for detecting and con­ trolling wildfires. While towers, just like decoys and pits, may be thought of as part of an authoritarian architecture of subjugation that instills fear and anxiety, in the case of the fire tower on the grounds of the Nassau County Museum of Art, the structure was built within an enlightened, scientific ideal of seeing and observing and was concerned with the well-being of humans and their environment. The structure thus conveys a notion of care for the habitats of humans and diverse species, albeit from the perspective of a mostly white, property-owning, upper-class citizenry. The three vertical structures that Miss built resembled a fire tower, but she modified some details. She did not provide ladders for visitors to climb so they could survey the grounds. Further, at the center of each platform was a large hole, rendering the structures even less useful (Figure 1.8). Still, the towers functioned as a viewing device, one in which the visitor remained on the ground rather than taking an elevated, superior position in relation to the natural world. We might think of the three towers as framing devices that draw attention to that which was previously invisible or neglected. Like the underground structure, the towers challenge us to see beyond our own subject positions and practice a responsible, public seeing. As its title suggests, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys conveyed the continuously shifting relationship between centers and margins.

14

Introduction

Figure 1.8 Mary Miss, study for Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, c. 1977. Pencil on paper, 5½ × 5½ in. Collection of Mary Miss. Source: © Mary Miss Studio. Photograph Mary Miss Studio.

From a distance, the three towers of Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys all looked the same, but approaching the individual structures, one realized that each was of a different size. The tower closest to the dirt embankment was eighteen feet tall; the second one, across the clearing, measured fifteen feet in height; and the third tower in the far distance was even shorter: twelve feet. The different sizes of the three towers were imperceptible when seen from the embankment because they reinforced the perspectival diminution of ob­ jects. The differences of the towers’ heights only came into focus when visitors walked across the field and experienced each tower in relation to their own bodies and came to realize that perception was intimately bound to their place within the whole.33 Analyzing Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys in relation to structures that inspired the work allows us to contemplate the visual, material, and conceptual forms of avant-garde art within specific historical and social contexts, and also to see our own positionality as imbricated within existing frameworks that we aim to transcend. Miss’s committed feminist practice did not shy away from actively shaping material and social environments. She pursued an interventionist, materialist practice concerned with effecting the everyday built environment. Since the late 1970s Miss has collaborated with architects, landscape designers, planners, engineers, and developers to design and realize more permanent public parks, reclamation projects, and functional environments. While Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys exemplified sculptural practices that expanded from the autonomous object into the architectural field, her later works were criticized for

Introduction

15

playing into the capitalist superstructure. Rather than drawing clear lines between the utopian-critical avant-garde and functional structures imbricated within capitalist ide­ ologies, this book develops an intersectional history of form that easily shifts back and forth between these disciplinary framings. The aim is to develop a deep history of form that understands form—imagined, rendered, built—as capable of changing existing so­ cial, economic, and aesthetic values. My contention is that materially built forms, no less than drawn, photographed, painted, and sculpted forms, have the capacity to reshape existing realities. This book, in short, explores the work of artists who engaged with the forms, structures, and practices of the built environment, which they understood to directly impact the social and material spaces of everyday life, in order to show that art itself constitutes an act of building and world-making. Before turning to the artists who came to define the canonical avant-garde of the long sixties, I look back to the early twentieth century. Chapter 2 traces the relationship between art, architecture, and the built environment as it played out in the decades lead­ ing up to the 1960s to understand the reasons for the severing of art and architectural discourses. I focus on the Bauhaus, which set out to merge aesthetic and architectural practices as part of a utopian vision to create an egalitarian society. The failure to realize this better world—and the all-too-easy subsumption of art, architecture, and building in the service of the hierarchical structures of capitalism, racism, and sexism—propelled a theoretical, critical distancing of avant-garde art from the material, social, and po­ litical practice of building. Postwar theorists and critics stressed the importance of art’s autonomy, which evolved into a self-referential, formal-aesthetic trajectory of modern art. Many American artists, however, remained interested in engaging with the material and social spaces of everyday life. This book shows that artists who were central to the development of the canonical avant-garde during the long sixties engaged with the built environment on formal-aesthetic and sociopolitical grounds. Chapter 3 focuses on the work of Judd and Grosvenor from the mid-1960s, showing that both took inspiration from engineering structures such as bridges, towers, and dams that were part of the everyday built environment. In addition to examining how their work referenced visual, material, and technological characteristics of twentieth-century engineering, I argue that both artists drew on the social and cultural significance of en­ gineering that played a central role in the conception of the United States as a modern, progressive nation. Analyzing works such as Judd’s floor box of 1965 (DSS 58) made with stainless steel and red fluorescent plexiglass, and Grosvenor’s Transoxiana (1965), a thirty-two-foot-long sculpture cantilevered from the ceiling, I trace the works’ visual, material, and technical characteristics to specific architectural structures featured in the exhibition Twentieth Century Engineering on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1964. Showcasing photographs of some of the most exciting contemporary engi­ neering feats, the exhibition captured the techno-optimism of the early 1960s. At once innovative and functional, the featured structures were thought to have a genuine ben­ efit to the population at large. Engineers developed new materials and techniques that resulted in innovative structures that raised individual living standards and advanced the nation economically and socially. Like Arthur Drexler, the curator of Twentieth Century Engineering, Judd and Grosvenor (and many other artists whose work would be canonized as minimal art) were intrigued by the promise that scientific and tech­ nological innovations would advance American civilization. However, the one-sided, overtly positive view of engineering conveyed in the MoMA exhibition paid little heed to the devastating impact of large-scale construction. Ambitious engineering projects 34

16

Introduction

benefited a particular segment of the population—mostly those already privileged and in power—rather than all. Oldenburg and Smithson, the artist discussed in Chapter  4, expanded their views from the technologically advanced and efficient masterpieces of engineering to the di­ lapidated, forgotten, and outdated structures they encountered. Rather than emphasiz­ ing the functionality and newness of buildings, they paid attention to the processes of time and history and the concomitant changes of materialities, forms, and meanings. Taking impetus from the practices of historic preservation, they envisioned monuments, landmarks, and ruins that opened up the functionalist conception of the built environ­ ment to other styles, narratives, and values. Preservationists at the time focused on saving and restoring the finest examples of Western architectural styles, in particular examples of the decorative nineteenth-century beaux-arts style that architectural mod­ ernism despised. They also considered the sociohistorical meanings of buildings. Under these expanded premises, a structure like the then-dilapidating Ellis Island Immigration Station, which was considered a minor example of the beaux-arts style but had played a significant role in the history of American immigration, was seen as monument worthy. But who had the right to decide which styles and which histories were to be preserved and remembered, while others were destroyed and forgotten? Oldenburg and Smithson designated existing structures, buildings, and objects as monuments to endow them with new value and public meaning. However, they were not interested in pristine res­ toration and material preservation but (like many other artists, respectively associated with pop and earth art) in complicating and broadening the meanings inscribed within the forms of everyday life. In particular, Oldenburg and Smithson revealed the destruc­ tive aspects of urban and suburban modernization, considering the experiences of a more diverse public, including those marginalized by Western, technocratic conceptions of progress. Chapter 5 explores the work of Weiner and Matta-Clark in the context of architec­ tural planning, whereby concepts rendered in the form of zoning laws, building codes, architectural and urban plans, and models provide a guide for material realizations. Both artists worked at the juncture of immaterial ideas and material realizations, paying at­ tention not just to objects, houses, neighborhoods, monuments, and infrastructures but to the ideas that guided the material realization of these built forms. The logic of New York City’s zoning resolution, in particular, served as a point of reference for conceptual artists. This regulatory framework was guided by democratic principles in which the private and public, individual creativity, aesthetic predilections, and communal responsi­ bilities were closely intertwined—and ideally balanced. Artist Sol LeWitt wrote an essay in which he considered how the city’s zoning resolution directly impacted the visual and material shapes of the built environment. Focusing on Weiner’s early linguistic statements and Matta-Clark’s building cuts, I show that their work was rooted in democratic strate­ gies intent on giving individuals a stake in the shaping of their environment. Both artists asked the public to take responsibility for the making and meaning of a work of art and thus consider how visual, material, and conceptual forms had the capacity to (re)shape the world. Such a politics of freedom, however, was prone to perpetuate existing master narratives of progress, relying on social conventions and aesthetic trends that continued to discriminate along racial, national, gendered, and socioeconomic lines. By reinsert­ ing their work, which was respectively associated with conceptual and site-specific art, within local, national, as well as transnational frameworks, this chapter conveys the

Introduction

17

predicaments of American democracy, of balancing individual freedom and public responsibility, in the precarious project of building a more just and sustainable world. In the conclusion, I return to the work of Mary Miss, which guided the overarching narrative of the book. By way of summarizing the main findings and methodological ap­ proach, I highlight the possibilities of working and thinking across art, architecture, and the built environment to upend the dichotomies not only between fine art and functional structures but also between nature and culture, and do so from a feminist, intersectional positionality. Notes 1. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44; re­ printed in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 276–290. 2. Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose, eds., Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 3. Mary Miss  and R. J. Onorato, Mary Miss: Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, exh. cat. (Roslyn, NY: Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, 1978). For Miss’s interest in vernacular structure, see also Alvin Boyarsky, Joseph Giovannini, and Mary Miss, Mary Miss: Projects, 1966–1987 (London: Architectural Association, 1987), 9–35; Mary Miss, “Interview with Anne Barclay Morgan,” Artpapers 18, no. 4 (July 1994): 20–25; and Mary Miss, “On a Redefinition of Pub­ lic Sculpture,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 52–70. 4. For discussions of public sculpture in 1960s New York and beyond, see Michele H. Bogart, The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 2006); Michele H. Bogart, Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York City (London: Reaktion Books, 2018); Casey N. Blake, ed., The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Harriet F. Senie, ed., Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, Controversy (New York: Basic Books, 1992); W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1992); Amanda Douberley, “The Corporate Model: Sculpture, Architecture, and the American City, 1946–1975,” PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2015; and Christopher M. Ketcham, “Minimal Art and Body Politics in New York City, 1961–1975,” PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. 5. Cécile Whiting, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006); and Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Post­ modern City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). See also Katherine Smith, The Ac­ cidental Possibilities of the City: Claes Oldenburg’s Urbanism in Postwar America (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021). 6. Joshua Shannon, “The Role of Form in the Social History of Art,” in The Present Prospects of Social Art History, eds. Anthony E. Grudin and Robert Slifkin (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021), 159. See also Robert Slifkin, “Abject Art History,” in The Present Prospects, 175–187; and Kristina Jõekalda, “What has become of the New Art History?,” Journal of Art Historiography 9 (December 2013): 1–7. 7. Anna Lovatt, “Rosalind Krauss: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 1985,” in The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, eds. Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), 191–201; and Stephen Moonie, Art Criticism and Modernism in the United States (Lon­ don and New York: Routledge, 2022), 59–104. 8. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–143; Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London: Verso, 2011); and Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams, The Architecture of Art History: A Historiography (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), 113–129. On the difference between social art history and poststructural formalism, see Joshua Shannon and Ja­ son Weems, “A Conversation Missed: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Americanist/ Modernist Divide,” in A Companion to American Art, eds. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill,

18

Introduction

and Jason D. LaFountain (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 17–33; and Jennifer L. Rob­ erts, “Response: Setting the Roundtable, or, Prospects for Dialogue,” in Companion to Ameri­ can Art, 34–48. 9. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 2009); Robert Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); and David Raskin, Donald Judd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). See also Jo Applin, Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); and David Getsy, Abstract Bod­ ies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 10. See for example the many recent efforts to decolonize art history, as in Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, “Decolonizing Art History,” Art History 43, no. 1 (February 2020): 8–66; or Charlene Villaseñor Black and Tim Barringer, “Decolonizing Art and Empire,” Art Bulletin, 104, no. 1 (March 2022): 6–20. 11. Oral history interview with Mary Miss, July  18 and 20, 2016. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Conducted by Annette Leddy at the home and studio of Mary Miss in New York City, New York. 12. The Collective, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 1 (January 1977), n.p. 13. Amy Tobin, “Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics,” Women: A Cultural Review 30, no. 3 (2019): 280. 14. Volumes on women artists in the context of new media art and science include Judy Malloy, ed., Women, Art, and Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), and Christine Filippone, Science, Technology, and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America (Oxon UK, and New York, NY: Routledge, 2017). Feminist scholarship in architectural history forms a distinct body of literature, including Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality & Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997); Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998); and Torsten Lange and Lucía C. Pérez-Moreno, eds., “Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism,” Architectural Histories 8, no. 1 (December 2020), https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.563. 15. See papers by Crystal am Nelson and Sadia Shirazi presented as part of the 2022 College Art Association session “ ‘Heresies’ and other Mythologies,” chaired by Abbe Schriber and Mon­ tana Marie Ray. 16. Examples of feminist art histories include Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, eds., WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Ange­ les (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Helena Reckitt, ed., The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857–2017 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2018); and Rachel Middleman, Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 17. Ruth E. Iskin, “Feminism, Exhibitions and Museums in Los Angeles, Then and Now,” Wom­ an’s Art Journal 37, no. 1 (2016): 14–15; Donna Conwell, “Protesting Art and Technology,” in Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945–1980, eds. Rebecca Peabody et al. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 219; and Susanneh Bieber, “Tech­ nology, Engineering, and Feminism: The Hidden Depths of Judy Chicago’s Minimal Art,” Art Journal 80, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 106–123. 18. Zoë Ryan and Mary Miss, “A Conversation with Mary Miss,” in Log 9 (Winter/Spring 2007): 111–112. See also Mary Miss cited in Avis Berman, “A Decade of Progress, But Could a Female Chardin Make a Living,” ARTNews (October 1980): 77. 19. Mary Miss in conversation with Alvin Boyarksy, Mary Miss: Projects, 69–72; Laurie Ander­ son, “Mary Miss,” Artforum 12, no. 3 (November 1973): 65. 20. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 276. 21. See also Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 35–69. 22. Anne M. Wagner, “Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of Sculpture,” Grey Room 14 (Winter 2004): 32; Papapetros and Rose, Retracing the Expanded Field, vii–xvii. 23. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 277. See also Krauss’s discussion of grids as aes­ thetic objects, in Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50–64. For contem­ porary phenomenological readings of Miss’s work, see Lucy R. Lippard, “Mary Miss: An

Introduction

19

Extremely Clear Situation,” Art in America 62, no. 2 (March–April 1974): 76–77; reprinted in Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 210–213; Ronald J. Onorato, “Illusive Spaces: The Art of Mary Miss,” Artforum 17, no. 4 (December  1978): 28–33. See also Laurie Anderson, “Mary Miss,” Artforum 12, no. 3 (November 1973): 65; and Lawrence Alloway, “Mary Miss,” The Nation, October 14, 1978, 389. 24. Sarah Hamill, “‘The Skin of the Earth’: Mary Miss’s Untitled 1973/75 and the Politics of Pre­ carity,” Oxford Art Journal 41, no. 2 (August 2018): 271–291. For a feminist reading of Miss’s work within land art, see Kim Timken, “Women, Land Art and the Social (1978–83),” PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2020, 24–74. 25. Hamill, “The Skin of the Earth,” 277. 26. Hamill, “The Skin of the Earth,” 290. 27. Onorato, “Illusive Spaces, 28. 28. On the abstractness of Miss’s work, see Hal Foster, “Mary Miss,” Artforum (Summer 1980): 84. 29. Martha Frick Symington Sanger, The Henry Clay Frick Houses: Architecture, Interior, Land­ scapes in the Golden Era (New York: Monacelli Press, 2001), 225; Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), 418, 464; and “History,” Nassau County Museum of Art website; https://nassaumuseum.org/history/ [accessed April 17, 2022]. 30. Sanger, The Henry Clay Frick Houses, 260. 31. In Miss’s conception of the work, visitors coming from the main building of the Nassau County Museum of Art would encounter the towers first and then the underground structure. But Krauss’s sole focus on the latter has upended this sequence. 32. The poet William Cullen Bryant, a nature lover and passionate gardener, owned the property before Henry Clay Frick bought it. See Sanger, The Henry Clay Frick Houses, 219–221. 33. Miss  and Onorato, Mary Miss: Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, 14–19. For the importance of public participation and sensory experience in Miss’s work, see respectively Eleanor Heartney, “Beyond Boundaries,” in Mary Miss, eds. Mary Miss and Daniel M. Abramson (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 9–13; and Joseph Giovannini, “Thick Space,” in Mary Miss, 15–31. 34. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City,” October 47 (Winter 1988), 3–52, reprinted in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, ed. Rosalyn Deutsche (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 79–93.

2

Constructing a Better World From the Bauhaus to Postwar America

In the aftermath of World War I, art’s role in shaping everyday life was a topic of great concern throughout Europe and beyond. Various avant-garde movements—Constructivism in the Soviet Union, De Stijl in the Netherlands, Purism in France, and, perhaps most per­ tinently, the Bauhaus in Germany—sought to unify art and building. Artists, architects, and designers who initiated and participated in these movements aspired to expand their work beyond an exclusive art world accessible only to the privileged. They envisioned an art that would permeate society so that everyone could benefit. The utopian beliefs of avant-garde artists were closely aligned with sociopolitical changes of the time, particu­ larly the Russian Revolution of 1917, which spurred hope that a new social order—one in which all people were equal—was close at hand. While causing much human suffer­ ing and the destruction of entire cities, World War I also constituted a new beginning, a tabula rasa upon which a new society that transcended old hierarchies and divisions could be built.1 Founded in Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus aimed to unite art, architecture, and de­ sign in the construction of a new harmonious society. In its manifesto, Bauhaus director Walter Gropius put the school’s mission in visionary terms: Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.2 Gropius’s ideas marked a continuation of Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk— the “total artwork” that synthesized painting and architecture with music and drama. As Juliet Koss has shown, the creative and aesthetic ideas of Wagner were infused with political ambitions.3 His aims were closely allied with the efforts of Europe’s 1848 revo­ lutionaries to overthrow outmoded aristocratic and monarchic rulers and replace them with social-democratic governments.4 In the months before taking on the leadership of the Bauhaus, Gropius directed the revolutionary Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art), calling for the renewal of the arts under the wing of architecture. He and the council members thought of avant-garde artists as ahead of their time, possessing the capacity to anticipate a more perfect society and depict it in visual form. Working with pencil on paper or paint on canvas, artists could realize their work largely unencumbered by the material and economic constraints inflicted on the building industry in postwar Germany that battled high inflation and a major recession. Thus, when appointed director of the Bauhaus, Gropius initially hired DOI: 10.4324/9781003295105-2

Constructing a Better World

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visual artists rather than architects. His first appointment was Lyonel Feininger, a painter known for his faceted, crystalline renderings of buildings and cityscapes that resulted in exquisite mirage-like presences (Figure 2.1).5 While Feininger’s paintings depicted exist­ ing buildings, such as the village church of Gelmeroda or the cityscape of Teltow, he transformed them into ethereal visions of a new society with his geometric, abstracted forms and his use of thinly layered oil paints. Feininger became best known for the wood­ cut Cathedral, which he created for the cover of the Bauhaus manifesto. In the print, he visually articulated the new society Gropius had conjured with words.6 For immaterial ideas to become reality, Gropius aspired to train a new generation of artist-builders who could unite the visionary ideas of the fine arts with the practical skill of applied artists and architects. The Bauhaus curriculum consisted of the six-month Vorkurs (foundation course), in which students, taught by the spiritually inclined Jo­ hannes Itten, gained elementary knowledge of forms and materials. Over the next three years, students enrolled in workshops devoted to various materials, from clay to wood, from textiles to metals. Each workshop was jointly led by an instructor in form and one in craft. Formlehre (form theory) was the prerogative of avant-garde artists, including Feininger, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky; Werklehre (work, or craft, theory) was taught by artisans who focused on technical and design skills. Graduating students who

Figure 2.1 Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda III, 1913. Oil on canvas, 43.5 × 31.5 in. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Source: Photograph courtesy National Galleries Scotland, purchased 1985. Photograph by Antonia Reeve © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

22

Constructing a Better World

had successfully united avant-garde sensibilities with practical knowledge were hired as the next generation of Bauhaus masters; these included Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, and Gunta Stölzl.7 The school professed to the ideals of equality, doing away with hierarchies not only of art and craft but also of gender. In July 1919 Gropius noted in a speech to Bauhaus students that the program made “no distinction between the fair and the strong sex.”8 In its first two years of operation, the school admitted more than 200 female students— about half the student body.9 Anja Baumhoff’s research, however, has revealed that the school remained structured by conventional patterns of male power that disadvantaged women students (already apparent in Gropius’s distinction of a “fair” and a “strong” sex). In 1921 Gropius and the school’s masters’ council instituted more stringent ad­ mission standards for female applicants with the aim of limiting their numbers. They also channeled female students into the weaving workshop, which they deemed more suitable to their character.10 Women were generally thought unfit to participate in work­ shops that required hard physical labor, including stone and wood sculpture, metalwork, wall painting, and carpentry. Nevertheless, over the course of its fourteen-year existence, more than a third of all Bauhaus students were female, and women were represented— albeit in limited numbers—in all the workshops. These students created significant works: Marianne Brandt’s iconic teapot, the spatial wall paintings by Dörte Helm, and Gertrud Arndt’s carpets from the early 1920s, for example (Figures 2.2 and 2.3).11 However, Stölzl, who enrolled as a student in 1919, was the only woman who became a master teacher at the Bauhaus. She successfully led the weaving workshop as artistic and technical director from 1927 to 1931, though at a much lower salary than her male colleagues.12 Around 1923 Gropius directed the Bauhaus toward a stronger embrace of industrial production. While sometimes seen as a break with the school’s original focus on craft, this development cohered with the overall goal of the Bauhaus in moving from idea to tangible realization in the material world.13 Student work began with formal and material

Figure 2.2 Gertrud Arndt, design for a carpet, Carpet 2, 1924. Watercolor and pencil on paper (blue, yellow, grey), 4.6 × 3.5 in. Source: © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph © Bauhaus-Archiv/ Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin.

Constructing a Better World

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Figure 2.3 Director’s office of Walter Gropius at Bauhaus Weimar, with carpet by Gertrud Arndt (1924), wall hanging by Else Mögelin (1923), office lamp by Wilhelm Wagenfeld (1923–24), and hanging lamp by Gerrit Rietveld (1920). Photograph by Lucia Moholy, ca. 1924–25, printed in 1927, image 7 x 4.9 in., sheet 8.1 x 5 in. Bauhaus-Archiv/ Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin. Source: Photograph © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Bauhaus-Archiv/ Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin. Artworks by Gertrud Arndt and Wilhelm Wagenfield © 2023 Artists Rights So­ ciety (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; artwork by Gerrit Rietveld © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/c/o Pictoright Amsterdam; artwork by Else Mögelin © Estate of Else Mögelin.

24

Constructing a Better World

experiments, moving first from drawings, paintings, and sculptures to the design of func­ tional objects, including lamps, chairs, and carpets; then to wall murals and wallpapers; and finally to the design and construction of buildings and the planning of entire cities. The mode of production changed accordingly from individually created artworks and avant-garde experimentation to technologically advanced fabrication. Mass production of Bauhaus-designed objects was necessary in order to make them available to the general public and permeate society. New experts from outside the institution were hired as the Bauhaus moved toward this goal. László Moholy-Nagy, known for his interest in new technologies and industrial materials, joined in 1923; Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer, the first architects hired by Gropius, arrived in 1927; the following year urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer joined the faculty.14 The newcomers and the respective changes they personified caused tensions with the established faculty. Artists, including Feininger, Itten, Klee, and Kandinsky, were ini­ tially excited to move from easel paintings to large murals and wall tapestries for which they provided the concepts and retained authority over the final products, even if ex­ ecuted in collaboration with others. As the Bauhaus expanded to industrial production, architecture, and urban planning, however, the first roster of faculty had to concede authority to technicians and engineers. Avant-garde visual artists initially appointed to lead the way had to yield their special status; individual visionary ideas were superseded by a concern for actual building that required a turn from the metaphysical to the ma­ terial. The mystically oriented Itten, who had played a key role in the initial years of the Bauhaus—teaching the Vorkurs, for example—was sidelined and left in 1923. The change in leadership from Gropius to Hannes Meyer in 1928 marked a further shift from individual autonomy to a socialist attitude that prioritized actual building for the community.15 In addition, compromises had to be made in the process of translating utopian ideas into reality, factoring in various practical, structural, and economic concerns. The cost of materials, for example, increased dramatically when building functional, durable ob­ jects or actual houses and neighborhoods. Such endeavors required industrially produced steel and concrete, necessitating collaboration with factories and the capitalist market system. Mass production, however, was based on class hierarchies, with millions of fac­ tory employees alienated from the work they produced and paid little in comparison to the wealth amassed by the business owners who hired them. Utopian ideas of equal­ ity encountered individual striving and exploitation in the real world. Those in power were keen to reap the benefits for themselves, insisting that without their leadership, knowledge, and education, no profits would be made in the first place. Even within the Bauhaus, the tension between individual gain and care for the community surfaced regu­ larly. Architectural historian Frederic Schwartz has shed light on the tensions around the distribution of profits at the school. When Marcel Breuer, for example, invented the tubular steel chair during his tenure at the Bauhaus, he applied for a patent to collect a share from commercial sales for himself rather than naming the institution as the ben­ eficiary. A “better” world in the eyes of one person did not necessarily benefit others or the community.16 The dramas of the Bauhaus played out against the backdrop of the Weimar Republic and its struggles. The newly elected German leaders, who were dedicated to establishing a social-democratic government, faced enormous challenges. They had to take respon­ sibility for Germany’s defeat in World War I and mitigate the high reparation payments demanded by the Allies. Discontent amongst the population, furthered the rise of the

Constructing a Better World

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National Socialist Party, under the control of Adolf Hitler, who aggressively touted his commitment to the common man and woman, promising to rebuild a strong, unified German nation. Hitler saw himself as an aspiring artist, one endowed with the gift to en­ vision an ideal future. After the Nazis took control of the German government, thwart­ ing the social democratic agenda of the Weimar Republic, Hitler decided—as Germany’s self-fashioned authoritarian leader—who was to be included in his “ideal” world, ruth­ lessly destroying the lives of those he deemed inferior.17 To materially realize his vision of the Third Reich, which he conceived as the ultimate stage in a teleological development of history, he appointed Albert Speer as his architect in chief to design monumental neoclassical buildings that would convey the glory of the Germanic Reich into eternity. Within the economic climate of a worldwide depression, construction on such a megalo­ maniacal scale heavily relied on forced labor by the lower classes and racial and ethnic minorities. Paul Jaskot has provided an incisive account of how the grandiose architec­ ture of the Third Reich was premised on the exploitation and annihilation of others.18 Nazi politics were articulated in the built environment, which reinforced the structures of tyranny and fear. Critics and historians have retrospectively positioned the plain forms of modernist architecture and their egalitarian aspirations in opposition to the grand neoclassical architecture that fascists erected to assert their power. In her groundbreaking 1968 study, however, Barbara Miller Lane showed that the stylistic distinction between the streamlined modularity of modernist buildings and Nazi architecture was not clear cut.19 The Nazis employed a variety of styles for different purposes, including struc­ tures made with steel, glass, and concrete and incorporating mass-produced elements that mirrored the stripped-down functionalism associated with modernist architecture. The Nazis strategically integrated ideas associated with the Bauhaus as part of their own agenda.20 In addition, many of the Bauhäuslers were not opposed to catering to or collaborating with the Nazis. In 1935, for example, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe participated in the architectural competition for the German pavilion at the Brussels International Exhibition, producing renderings that prominently displayed a swastika flag. Other architects who had trained at the Bauhaus sought employment on Speer’s staff, embracing Nazi politics, and then continued their careers unscathed as modern architects in postwar Germany.21 While the Bauhaus’s heroic stance against fascism was retrospectively mythologized, the schools’ ideals fostered inclusion and international cooperation rather than a xeno­ phobic, racist nationalism. During the 1920s Gropius saw national and international progress as reciprocal forces. He was in close contact with avant-garde practitioners in Russia, France, and the Netherlands, exchanging ideas and welcoming them as faculty members at the Bauhaus. With the depression in the late 1920s and 1930s, it became increasingly controversial to favor international over domestic faculty, leading to fund­ ing problems with right-wing parties, which were garnering the support of the populace. The left-leaning Hannes Meyer, who had taken over the leadership of the Bauhaus in 1928, was dismissed after only two years and decided to move together with some of his students to the Soviet Union. He was replaced by Mies van der Rohe, who sought the survival of the Bauhaus as a purely aesthetic entity detached from the institution’s sociopolitical ambitions and responsibilities. However, due to the school’s association with the international avant-garde, he and his colleagues were decried as Bolshevists and denigrated as enemies of the Nazis’ nationalist-racial cause. Under these circumstances, many Bauhaus faculty members—including Mies, Gropius, Breuer, and Albers—had no

26

Constructing a Better World

choice but to leave their country. They looked to the New World, and the United States in particular, as more fertile ground for the realization of their ideas.22 After the inconceivable disasters of World War II and the Holocaust, art critics, histo­ rians, and political leaders in the democratic West were eager to disassociate avant-garde ideas and practices from any entanglement with fascist or overtly socialist politics. These efforts were undertaken in architecture and the visual arts on stylistic grounds, pitting the formalist innovations of modernism against grand neoclassical buildings and repre­ sentational painting. Having been shunned by the Nazis as infantile or “degenerate,” the avant-garde practices of such Bauhaus-connected architects and artists as Gropius, Mies, Feininger, Kandinsky, and Klee came to stand as oppositional forces to fascist aesthetics in Germany and more generally to oppressive regimes.23 Abstract avant-garde art was pitched against the figurate art of socialist realism that depicted nationalist subject mat­ ter. By highlighting novel formal characteristics, Western critics hoped to save the avant­ garde’s sociopolitical intentions. The thinkers of the Frankfurt School in Germany played a crucial role in reformulat­ ing the socio-progressive potential of the avant-garde. Founded as the Institute of Social Research in 1923, the school was firmly rooted in Marxist thought. During the 1930s its members—notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin— advanced their theories in response to the development of totalitarian regimes in Europe and the Soviet Union. In Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944), Horkheimer and Adorno asked why the project of enlightenment had failed so miserably. How had reason, which was supposed to free humans from fear and ignorance, led to the barbarities of World War II, with Germans following a fascist authoritarian leader, committing genocide, and instigating the war? The authors faulted the culture industry for deceiving people, promising progress and freedom, even though these values were illusionary within capitalist consumer society.24 The only viable position for a socially progressive avant-garde was to stand apart from the encompassing system of consumer capitalism. Instead of collaborating with existing power structures to effect social change, Horkheimer and Adorno conceived of the notion of expert cultures—including painting, music, and literature—that were to be autonomous from the culture industry in order to effectively critique it. Horkheimer and Adorno continued to be guided by socio-philosophical concerns, whereby avant-garde theories remained embedded in society. As part of their overall belief in the project of enlightenment, they thought it crucial to continuously test the effectiveness of their theories against everyday reality. Their dialectic method required ongoing self-questioning and reassessment of one’s position in order to avoid the dangers of righteous ideologies and to remain open to that which was not yet conceptually un­ derstood. In the postwar period, Adorno continued to refine his aesthetic theory so that it stayed true to art’s transformative potential in society. In Aesthetic Theory (1970), he reasserted his commitment to art’s autonomy, insisting on the formal category of fine art in the tradition of the aesthetic philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Hegel. Drawing on Hegel’s notion of art’s intellectual import (geistiger Gehalt), Adorno continued to emphasize art’s relationship to society, a stance already present in the Marx­ ist roots of the Frankfurt School. His theory acknowledged the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of an artwork’s autonomy.25 In a postwar America reaping the rewards of capitalism, the notion of art’s autonomy developed into a formalist apoliticism. The autonomy of art was a key concept in the the­ ories of Clement Greenberg, who became one of the major critics shaping the direction of

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American avant-garde art after World War II. While his intentions were initially aligned with progressive politics, his theory became narrowly formalist. Like the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, he positioned fine art as separate from the products of culture industry— or “kitsch,” as he put it. He saw the formal inventions of abstract expressionism as blows against authoritarian regimes, whether in Germany or the Soviet Union, and thus against repression. Drawing on the theories of Kant and Hegel, he understood aesthetic progress to be internal to art, autonomous and independent of society. Greenberg’s formal-philosophical project measured cultural advancement by way of art’s own purifica­ tion that omitted the dialectical relationship between art and society fundamental to the ideas of the Frankfurt School. He was particularly concerned with painting, favoring it above sculpture and architecture, because it was the medium most removed from real­ ity, thus creating a hierarchy that would prevent the collapsing of art into life.26 For this purpose, he developed the criterion of “medium specificity,” arguing that the quality of flatness was essential to painting. Yves-Alain Bois aptly described Greenberg’s develop­ ment as a gradual turnabout from a structural formalism that retained its political po­ tency to a narrow, self-referential formalism that lost touch with the social aspiration of the avant-garde.27 Greenberg’s modernist theory was a product of his own place and time. Living in the United States in the postwar era, the critic understood art’s autonomy as synonymous with freedom. In light of the regressive regimes that had risen to power in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, Americans prided themselves on their liberal democratic society. They were united in their stand against fascism and authoritarianism (though not always communism), a political position that gained further credence as the Cold War intensi­ fied. Focusing on the new generation of abstract expressionists, Greenberg—along with other critics such as Irving Sandler and Harold Rosenberg—saw the abstract expression­ ists’ groundbreaking paintings as manifestations of American freedom. Greenberg, in particular, championed the work of Jackson Pollock, arguing that his spontaneous and unfettered working method conveyed the artist’s individuality, the hallmark of a free society. American artists did not need to adhere to any conventions; they could paint in any style, free of subject matter, without concern for the political or economic elite. But, as Serge Guilbaut argued, such notions of freedom and autonomy were illusionary. He showed how the US government instrumentalized abstract expressionism in the service of its own liberal capitalist democracy, thus legitimizing its own imperialist stance.28 Supportive critics maintained that abstract expressionism was firmly rooted in free­ dom and individualism and was representative of American democracy. Artists—defined implicitly as white, male, cisgender, and heterosexual—were thought to be endowed with the gift of intuition that allowed them to express the spirit of the time, the zeitgeist. Pol­ lock’s claim of “I am nature” exemplified the ambition of abstract expressionists to paint unconsciously or naturally to create art expressive of its time.29 However, by rooting art­ ists’ creative powers in their inner authentic natures, critics positioned them as passive mediums stripped of individual will. Such a symptomatic mode of art making stood in contrast to an aesthetic practice, in which artists aspired to envision or construct a better society, and as such were also responsible for their work and how it affected the world around them. In case of the patriarchal, heroic narrative of American abstract expres­ sionism, the interpretative agency of the artist, in terms of the meaning of their aesthetic program, was superseded by the commentator or historian who explicated the stylistic characteristics of art and revealed how the new style reflected broader cultural and social currents.30

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Despite their focus on developing a specifically national art, American critics and the political and cultural elite were keen to establish the validity of abstract expressionism as an international successor to the European avant-garde. They positioned the ideals of freedom and individuality conveyed in the art of abstract expressionism as characteristic of a new world order to emerge after World War II. Such an international art was to be abstract not only because it signaled defiance against fascism but also because it cor­ responded with artists’ earlier ambitions to create a visual language that transcended linguistic and national differences. Figurative art, by contrast, due to its references to specific people, places, and events, retained an air of narrow nationalist fervor. After World War II, the ideals that constituted progress on an international level were directed by the United States, spreading Western patriarchal ideals of individual freedom and unfettered economic growth as synonymous with human progress. Preference was given to its own capitalist free-market system and the aesthetic practices that best represented and reinforced that system.31 Many abstract expressionists, in addition to being aware of European and interna­ tional trends, took inspiration from domestic precedents. Artists such as Pollock and Mark Rothko trained during the 1930s and were closely involved with New Deal art projects and the mural movement, which were permeated by a strong sense of moral purpose. Like their European counterparts, many American artists of the 1920s and 1930s aspired to expand their practices beyond an elite notion of fine art. They created works that were not just the prerogative of the wealthy but were accessible to the people. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn painted figuratively because it was easily readable by the common people; they were particularly drawn to painting murals, which allowed them to expand the reach of art from the private into the public sphere.32 Numerous scholars, including Erika Doss, have emphasized the continuity between preand postwar American art.33 Others, such as Angela Miller, Robert Slifkin, and Cécile Whiting, have focused on the continued importance of figurative art in postwar America, thus expanding our understanding of the diversity of artistic production during this time and also questioning the political implications of viewing abstraction as progressive and figuration as retrograde.34 Following their American predecessors, Pollock and other abstract expressionists were interested in making art that had a social impact. They created large-scale works that ex­ ploded traditional notions of easel painting and entered the realm of building, expanding the flatness of painting into the three-dimensional space of sculpture and architecture. Significant for this trajectory was Pollock’s collaboration with the architect Peter Blake, at the time curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he championed the functionalist style of modern European architects such as Mies, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and others. For Pollock’s 1949 solo show Murals in Modern Architecture at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Blake worked with the artist to create a model of an Ideal Museum in which Pollock’s large abstract paintings became the walls (Figure  2.4). The model also featured abstract sculptures, a medium Pollock was just beginning to explore as part of his interest in three-dimensional practices that engaged the space of the viewer.35 While neither the museum nor the sculptures were realized at full scale, the project exemplified artists’ and architects’ interest in collaborating with each other. Creating large, mural-size paintings for buildings was an expensive and labor intensive endeavor. Without government-sponsored commissions, which had eroded in the post­ war era, artists relied on wealthy collectors and private businesses to execute ambitious

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Figure 2.4 Jackson Pollock and Peter Blake with the model for an Ideal Museum by Peter Blake, 1949. Source: © 2023 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © Peter Blake. All rights reserved, DACS/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2023. Photograph by Ben Schultz, courtesy Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY.

works. For example, Pollock’s first large-scale painting, Mural (1943), was commis­ sioned by Peggy Guggenheim for the entry of her townhouse in Manhattan, to be seen by the select few rather than the masses (Figure 2.5).36 Gallery owner Samuel Kootz was a key figure in conveying the value of large abstract paintings to the American upper and upper-middle classes, organizing exhibitions such as Painting for Spacious Living (1946) and The Muralist and the Modern Architect (1950). For the latter, he asked five architects to each collaborate with an artist who would design a mural for a building project. Philip Johnson, for example, worked with William Baziotes, and Marcel Breuer collaborated with Adolph Gottlieb. The exhibition featured models of the architectural projects next to the “murals,” which were, in fact, large portable paintings executed to scale rather than full-size murals so that they could more easily be sold.37 The art of abstract expressionism—be it by Baziotes, Gottlieb, or Pollock—was eas­ ily subsumed within the capitalist system because, unlike the figurative murals of the previous generation, the paintings did not depict explicit sociopolitical subject matter. The content consisted of colors, lines, and shapes, which could be appreciated on solely aesthetic terms. When working together with Blake on his 1949 exhibition, Pollock com­ plained that the architect saw his work as decoration.38 To avoid the easy absorption of abstract painting into architecture and capitalist consumer society, Greenberg empha­ sized opticality—the notion that art should be perceived by “eyesight alone” and thus be free from material and economic determinants—as an essential characteristic of avant­ garde art. In his criticism of the late 1950s and early 1960s, he spurned not only artists’ flirtation with representational subject matter in such movements as neo-dada and pop art but also the expansion of painting into literalist, abstract sculptures. Greenberg pos­ ited that modernist space was more “optical” or indeterminate than the “tactile” space,

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Figure 2.5 Peggy Guggenheim at home with Jackson Pollock in front of his Mural (1943), 155 East 61st Street, New York, 1946. Source: © 2023 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by George Karger. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, NY

be it of older art or the sculptural objects at the center of the new minimal art. Opticality, he argued, transcended the materialism associated with the petty concerns of daily life; it distinguished fine art from kitsch, decoration, and design.39 Mark Rothko’s Seagram Building commission of 1958 was an attempt to bridge the optical and the ideal with the material space of a painting grounded in social reality. Philip Johnson, known by this time for his lavish, eclectic designs and in charge of the interior of the Seagram Building in New York City, asked Rothko to paint a mural for the Four Seasons restaurant located at the base of the building. The artist worked fervently for a period of two years, producing over thirty paintings, seven of which he selected for the final installation. The large paintings were to be hung on the restaurant walls in an encompassing mural-like arrangement. The works’ geometric yet blurry forms of hover­ ing reds and maroons at once entered into the space of the viewer and receded into the distance, addressing viewers within the reality of their own world and at the same time transporting them into the realm of immaterial ideas. But Rothko had assessed the suc­ cess of his work in the secluded space of his studio, where he and rare visitors engaged directly and solely with the paintings’ material and optical properties. Upon visiting the now-operating restaurant, Rothko saw that his paintings would have been a mere back­ drop for the crowd of lively guests; he turned down the commission. Like Johnson’s

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design for the main dining room, the paintings would have become an endorsement of extravagant high-society lifestyles rather than created a self-reflective space in which viewers pondered the conditions of their own existence.40 Artists working during the long sixties continued the ambitions of their predecessors to expand their work into the built environment so that it would have a palpable public impact. In the 1958 essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” written a year after Pollock’s untimely death, Allan Kaprow positioned the artist’s mural-sized works as an effort to move from painting into three-dimensional space: “Pollock’s choice of enormous sizes served many purposes, chief of which for our discussion is the fact that by making muralscale paintings, they ceased to become paintings and became environments.”41 Asking how contemporary artists might build on Pollock’s legacy, Kaprow suggested they “give up the making of paintings entirely.” He elaborated: “Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street.”42 During the late 1950s artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and other neo-dada artists incorporated objects and images from everyday life into their paintings, combining them with the abstract language and impasto paint application of abstract expressionism. Joshua Shannon has shown the extent to which the work of Johns and Rauschenberg, as well as the happenings of Claes Oldenburg and the minimalist sculp­ tures of Donald Judd, drew on the materiality and specificity of New York City—more, he argues, as an act of reflecting and grappling with the changes in their environment rather than (as I posit for the artists discussed in the subsequent chapters) one of partici­ pating in shaping the social and material spaces around them.43 Kaprow and Oldenburg extended their practices from painting and sculpture into three-dimensional space, pioneering the genres of environments and happenings. The work of these two artists was featured in the groundbreaking exhibition Environments, Situations, Spaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City during the summer of 1961.44 Kaprow accumulated hundreds of discarded car tires in the gallery’s courtyard to make Yard; visitors could climb onto the tires, literally becoming part of a three-dimen­ sional environment that formally resembled an abstract expressionist painting. Olden­ burg displayed about forty sculptural objects of everyday consumer items. He made the forms—following Pollock’s foray into sculpture—by covering a wire frame with plastersoaked muslin, which he then covered with the expressionist facture of paint. Oldenburg displayed the sculptures in the gallery’s mezzanine level, constituting the first iteration of The Store, which he subsequently augmented for installation in a former storefront in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.45 Even though both artists were interested in expand­ ing their sculptural work into environments, their approach to art differed in significant ways.46 Examining the written correspondence between Kaprow and Oldenburg in the months after Environments, Situations, Spaces, Eva Ehninger concluded, “While Ka­ prow is willing to give up the status of his productions as artworks, Oldenburg fears that his integrity as an artist is lost when his creative productivity is evaluated as something other than art.”47 Numerous American avant-garde artists during the 1960s challenged the boundaries between art and life, aspiring to make work that had an impact beyond the limited parameters of the artworld and contributed to building a better society. They thought to undo the elitist status of avant-garde art and make it relevant to a broader public. Some artists staged happenings, performances, and Fluxus events, in which they asked

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the audience to actively participate, leading in some cases to the merging of art and life. Others created more explicitly political art, for example, in support of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the Chicano labor movement, anti-war protests, environmen­ talism, or the women’s and gay liberation movements. These artists often drew on the power of figurative art to overtly advocate for racial, social, and environmental justice. This book focuses on artists who engaged in their work with the everyday built environ­ ment to participate in the construction of a better world and at the same time sought to advance the formal-aesthetic trajectory of modern art. In the following chapters, I  reframe the work of major American avant-garde artists by continuously toggling between art and the built environment, paying particular attention to visual, material, and con­ ceptual equivalences. By capturing the asymptotic relationship between formal-aesthetic avant-garde practices of the long 1960s and the built environment, this book foregrounds the central role of art in the construction of society. I position the visual, material, and conceptual forms of art as an act of building. Notes 1. On reconstruction after World War I, see Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Paris­ ian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cam­ bridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 2. Walter Gropius, “Program of Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar (1919), ” in Programs and Mani­ festos on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964/2002), 49. For the original German version, see Walter Gropius “Pro­ gramm des Staatliche Bauhauses in Weimar (1919),” in Das Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Ber­ lin, 1919–1933, ed. Hans M. Wingler (Cologne: Dumont, 2002), 39. For overviews on the Bauhaus, see Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, eds., Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops of Modernity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009); Annemarie Jaeggi, Philipp Oswalt, and Hellmut Seemann, eds., Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009); Anja Baumhoff and Magdalena Droste, eds. Mythos Bauhaus: Zwischen Selbsterfindung und Enthistorisierung (Berlin: Reimer, 2009); and Fiona MacCarthy, Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 3. Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). See also Danielle Follett and Anke Finger, eds., The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); and Ralf Beil and Claudia Dillmann, Gesamtkunstwerk Expressionismus (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010). 4. At the time of the 1848 revolutions, Germany was not yet a country but consisted of many in­ dependent principalities. National unity was achieved in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War. It was not until the end of World War I that the monarchy in Germany was abolished, providing the opportunity to create the social-democratic Weimar Republic. 5. Rose-Carol Washton Long, “From Metaphysics to Material Culture: Painting and Photogra­ phy at the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen JamesChakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 43–62; Detlef Mertins, “Anything but Literal: Sigfried Giedion and the Reception of Cubism in Germany,” in Archi­ tecture and Cubism, ed. Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, and Mon­ treal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1997), 219–251. 6. Roland März, Lyonel Feininger: Von Gelmeroda Nach Manhattan, exh. cat. Nationalgalerie Berlin (Berlin: GH Verlag, 1998); Charles Werner Haxthausen, “An Architecture of Light: Ly­ onel Feininger’s Viaduct,” in Bauhaus: Conceptual Model, 55–57. For the important symbol of the crystal in art and architectural discourses, see Regine Prange, Das Kristalline als Kunstsym­ bol: Bruno Taut und Paul Klee (New York: Georg Olms, 1991); and Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “The Interpretation of the Glass Dream—Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 40, no. 1 (March 1981): 20–43.

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7. Annemarie Jaeggi, “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model,” in Bauhaus: Conceptual Model, 13–20. 8. Gropius notes for a speech to the Bauhaus students, July 1919 (collection Bauhaus-Archiv, Mu­ seum für Gestaltung, Berlin), quoted in Anja Baumhoff, “What’s in the Shadow of the Bauhaus Block? Gender Issues in Classical Modernity,” in Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, ed. Christiane Schönfeld (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neuman, 2006), 51. 9. Anke Blümm and Patrick Rössler, “Soft Skills and Hard Facts: A Systematic Assessment of the Inclusion of Women,” in Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, eds. Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 3–24. 10. Anja Baumhoff, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic’s Premier Art Institute 1919–1932 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001). 11. Elizabeth Otto, Bauhausmädels: Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Margarete Heymann, Mar­ garetha Reichardt (Dresden: Sandstein, 2019); and Morgan Rindler, “Dörte Helm, Margaret Leiteritz, and Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp: Rare Women of the Bauhaus Wall-Painting Work­ shop,” in Bauhaus Bodies, 195–216. 12. Ulrike Müller and Ingrid Radewaldt, “Gunta Stölzl,” in Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective, eds. Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler (London: Bloomsbury and Herbert Press, 2019), 22–27. 13. For the close relationship between craft and industrial design, see Rafael Cardoso, “Craft ver­ sus Design: Moving Beyond a Tired Dichotomy,” in The Craft Reader, ed. Glen Adamson (New York: Berg Publishers, 2009), 321–332. 14. In contrast to the English Arts & Crafts movement, which was inspirational for German ap­ proaches to design, the Bauhaus embraced technological and industrial progress, seeing it as an essential part in the social advancement of society. Hermann Muthesius had traveled to England for research as part of the German arts education program. See John V. Maciuika, “Wilhelmine Precedents for the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus Culture, 1–25. 15. Meyer did not have enough authority among the artists who had been at the Bauhaus since the beginning, nor with the city government in Dessau, which faced election and catered to the growing segment of nationalist and conservative voters. Éva Forgács argues that Meyer’s forced resignation was not so much due to his Marxist political orientation but to internal ten­ sions; Éva Forgács, “Between the Town and the Gown: On Hannes Meyer’s Dismissal from the Bauhaus,” Journal of Design History 23, no. 3 (2010): 265–274. 16. Frederic J. Schwartz, “Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany’s Consumer Cul­ ture,” in Bauhaus Culture, 115–138; see also Robin Schuldenfrei, Luxury and Modernims: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 17. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company: 2008); and Peter Longerich, Hitler: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 18. Paul Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumen­ tal Building Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); and Elaine S. Hochman, “A Question of Culpability,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 4 (1997): 738–739. 19. Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). See also Emilio Gentile, “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism,” trans. Lawrence Rainey, Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 3 (September 1994): 55–87; and Mark Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,” Art Bul­ letin 84, no. 1 (January 2002):148–169. 20. Paul Jaskot, “The Nazi Party’s Strategic Use of the Bauhaus: Marxist Art History and the Po­ litical Conditions of Artistic Production,” in ReNew Marxist Art History, eds. Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, and Frederic J. Schwartz (London: Art Books, 2013), 382–397. 21. Winfried Nerdinger, “Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich,” in Bauhaus Culture, 139–152; Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies Van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Grove Press, 1989); and Laura Rosengarten, “Bauhaus und Nationalsozialismus,” in 100 Jahre Bauhaus: Vielfalt, Konflikt und Wirkung, eds. Bernd Hüttner und Georg Leidenberger (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2019), 73–86. 22. Gropius was long reluctant to leave Germany. Forgács writes that he only fully realized that he was positioned as an enemy when he was subject to a search on the train. See Éva Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, transl. John Bátki (Budapest, London, New York: Central European University Press, 1995), 199.

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23. Olaf Peters, Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937 (Munich: Prestel, 2014); Stephanie Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991). 24. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944), ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer­ sity Press, 2007). For the original German version, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “Kulturindustrie, Aufklärung als Massenbetrug,” in Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosopische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947), 144–198. See also Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999). 25. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Uni­ versity of Minnesota Press, 1997). See also B. O’Connor, ed., The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Geoffrey Boucher, Adorno Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); James Hellings, Adorno and Art: Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory (Houndmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and the issue “Adorno’s Aes­ thetic Theory at Fifty,” New German Critique 48, no. 2 (August 2021). Benjamin Buchloh, who immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1977, would become an important figure who drew on critical theory to infuse Krauss’s formalist-poststructural model with so­ ciopolitical urgency. Hal Foster consolidated this trajectory in his influential book Return of the Real of 1996. See Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 26. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939),” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3–21. See also T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical In­ quiry 9, no. 1, The Politics of Interpretation (September 1982): 139–156; and Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1, The Politics of Interpretation (Sept. 1982): 217–234. Both are reprinted in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 71–86, and 87–101. See also John O’Brian, introduction to Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol­ ume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xv–xxxiii. 27. Yves-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” in Art Since 1900, eds. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, et al., 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 2011), 32–39. 28. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Free­ dom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See also Ellen G. Landau, “Abstract Expressionism: Changing Methodologies for Interpreting Meaning,” in Reading Ab­ stract Expressionism: Context and Critique, ed. Ellen G. Landau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 1–124. 29. See Michael Schreyach, “‘I am nature’: Science and Jackson Pollock,” Apollo 166 (July–August 2007): 35–43. 30. For a differentiation between these approaches, see Shannon and Weems, “A  Conversation Missed,” and Roberts, “Setting the Roundtable,” 17–48. 31. Joan Marter and David Anfam, eds., A bstract Expressionism: The International Context (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). See also Max Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War”, Artforum (May 1973); and Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 15, no. 10 (June 1974): 39–41. 32. A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Mod­ ernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Anna Indych-Lopez, Muralism Without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); and Jody Patterson, Modernism for the Masses: Paint­ ers, Politics, and Public Murals in 1930s New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 33. For the importance of the early generation of American figurative artists for abstract expres­ sionism, see Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism. On Greenberg’s interest in rooting abstract expressionism within an American trajectory, see chapter eight in Marcia

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Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American For­ malist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 232–271. 34. Angela Miller, “Vibrant Matter”: The Countermodern World of Pavel Tchelitchew, The Art Bulletin 102, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 121–145; Robert Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art (Oakland, CA: University of California, 2013); Robert Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Cécile Whiting, “Ben Shahn: Aggrieved Men and Nuclear Fallout during the Cold War,” American Art 30, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 2–25. 35. Eric Lum, “Pollock’s Promise: Toward an Abstract Expressionist Architecture,” Assemblage 39 (August 1999): 62–93. Mies had already explored this idea in collages of 1945. See also Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, in which he used marble to decorative effects. See also Helen A. Harrison, “Paintings as Walls: Peter Blake, Jackson Pollock, and the Myth of Unframed Space,” paper delivered at the 11th Biennial Symposium of the Latrobe Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in Washington, DC (March 21, 2015). 36. The painting was highly praised by Greenberg marking the beginning of the critic’s enthusi­ astic support of Pollock as a leading figure of abstract expressionism. “Examining Pollock: Essays Inspired by the Mural Research Project,” special issue, Getty Research Journal 9, no. S1 (2017). 37. Kootz Gallery Records, Getty Research Institute. See also Emily S. Warner, “Marketing the Monumental: Wall Painting at Midcentury,” Archives of American Art Journal 56, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 26–49; Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 122; and Emily S. Warner, “Abstraction Unframed: Abstract Murals in New York, 1935–1960,” PhD disserta­ tion, University of Pennsylvania, 2017, 26–48. 38. Lum, “Pollock’s Promise,” 62–93. 39. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Venge­ ance, 1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Elissa Auther, “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 339–64; and Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). 40. Thomas Kellein, Mark Rothko: Kaaba in New York (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1989); Michael Compton, “Mark Rothko: Subjects of the Artist,” in Mark Rothko: The Seagram Mural Pro­ ject (Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1988), 8–17; Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko: To­ ward the Light in the Chapel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 154–184; and James E. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993). 41. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Artnews 57, no. 6 (October 1958): 24–26, 55–57. 42. Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” 56–57. Kaprow had studied with the Bauhaus­ emigre Albers at the Black Mountain College. See Philip Ursprung, trans. Fiona Elliott, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); see also Judith Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); and William Kaizen, “Framed Space: Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting,” Grey Room 13 (Fall 2003): 80–107. 43. Shannon, Disappearance of Objects, 49–148. 44. Martha Jackson Gallery, May 25–June 23, 1961; Kaizen, “Framed Space,” 100. 45. Smith, The Accidental Possibilities of the City, 53–104. 46. Eva Ehninger, “What’s Happening? Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg Argue about Art and Life,” Getty Research Journal, no. 6 (2014): 195–202; Robert Haywood, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg: Art, Happenings, and Cultural Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 47. Ehninger, “Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg,” 196.

3

Twentieth-Century Engineering

Donald Judd and Robert Grosvenor

In 1964 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York presented Twentieth Cen­ tury Engineering, an exhibition showcasing nearly 200 engineering projects selected by curator Arthur Drexler for their technical ingenuity, aesthetic beauty, and contributions to advancing society. The exhibition featured works such as the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, set to become the world’s longest suspension bridge when its construction across New York Bay was completed in November of that year (Figure 3.1); the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, one of the largest and most advanced telescopes in the world, built in 1962; and the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam in Iran of 1963, today known as Dez Dam, which retained a water reservoir of more than 2.7 million acre feet.1

Figure 3.1 Othmar Ammann and Charles S. Whitney, Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, New York City, under construction, 1964. Steel suspension bridge with a center span of 4,250 feet and side spans of 1,215 feet, total length with approaches is three miles. Source: Photo: Wurts Bros. Museum of the City of New York. DOI: 10.4324/9781003295105-3

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In his review of the exhibition, artist and critic Donald Judd wrote, “Dams, roads, bridges, tunnels, storage buildings, and various other useful structures comprise the bulk of the best visible things made in this century.”2 Judd was not the only artist who admired these masterpieces of engineering. When discussing Robert Grosvenor’s 1965 exhibition at the Park Place Gallery in New York, the critic Lucy Lippard posited that the artist “must have been much impressed by the exhibition of modern engineering at the Museum of Modern Art last year.”3 At once innovative and functional, these engineering structures were expressions of an advanced society. Engineers developed new materials and techniques in order to produce new efficient structures that raised living standards and advanced nations economically and socially. And yet the techno­ optimistic view of engineering conveyed in the MoMA exhibition gave little heed to the negative impact of large-scale construction. Building access roads and ramps re­ quired for new bridges in populated areas necessitated the demolition of homes and the eviction of residents; they also increased traffic and, thus, pollution. Dams and the resulting human-made lakes altered the landscape on a massive scale, destroying natu­ ral ecosystems or submerging existing villages, farms, and agricultural land. In reality, large engineering projects benefited some people—mostly those already privileged and in power—but not all. Being beneficiaries of the rising white American middle and upper classes, Judd and Grosvenor took inspiration from engineering structures in their endeavors to create avant­ garde art. They transformed the visual and material forms they encountered around them into abstract sculptural works to express a notion of progress that in the white Ameri­ can imagination was intimately linked to technological innovation, economic growth, and social progress. Despite their commonalities, each artist followed a slightly different trajectory. Inspired by everyday functional structures, Judd sought to create a specifi­ cally American art that expressed values of practicality and economic profitability funda­ mental to the United States as a capitalist democracy. His predilection for the everyday closely allied his work with pop artists of the time who depicted common objects. But rather than referencing consumer products tarred as short lived and fashionable, Judd looked to functional, well-engineered structures that he thought genuinely benefited the population. The focus on technological innovation in Twentieth Century Engineering furnished Judd with ideas for how to create formally novel contemporary art that also expressed ideals of social progress rooted in a pragmatic, rational attitude characteristic of America’s rise as a global power. Grosvenor was likewise enthused by the promise of science and technology as a means to advance society, but he had a stronger interest in the extraordinariness of modern engineering feats. His large sculptures—such as the thirty-two-foot-long Transoxiana that cantilevered from the ceiling—conveyed the awe that many held for innovative feats of engineering. Grosvenor was among the many practitioners during the mid-1960s who thought that scientific knowledge and technological innovation, if used responsi­ bly, could better the lives of people. Inspired by the shapes, colors, and scale of wellengineered structures, he made works that provided the public with impressive visual, spatial, and bodily experiences. In the mid-1960s both Grosvenor and Judd were key figures in the development of minimal art.4 In subsequent decades, however, Grosvenor’s work received relatively little attention, while Judd was celebrated—willingly or not—as one of the movement’s main protagonists. In addition to making art, Judd theorized contemporary art practices within modernist discourses. He coined the term “specific object”, which advanced avant-garde

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art beyond the rigid Greenbergian notion of medium specificity that emphasized paint­ ing’s flatness and opticality. As such, the new three-dimensional art blurred the bounda­ ries between painting and sculpture and provided an alternative to modern painting’s teleological endpoint. Judd’s criticism and art became central to the polemics of minimal art. While Grosvenor’s work was featured in all the major exhibitions that canonized the movement, he did not write about art or theorize his practice within broader avant­ garde developments. His aesthetic contributions have, thus, received little art historical attention, and indeed, only a few of his early works have survived. Grosvenor, neverthe­ less, created art that transcended the limitations of medium specificity—and arguably did so more successfully than Judd. His large three-dimensional installations, inspired by the scale of engineering feats, provided viewers with a lived, spatial experience that was fundamental to phenomenological interpretations of minimal art. However, such readings of minimal art that emphasized the subjectivity of viewers remained ahistorical and aloof from the realities of everyday life. Reinserting the works within contemporary architectural and engineering discourses at once historicizes the forms of minimal art and challenges us to practice a responsible, intersectional mode of seeing. Donald Judd After seeing the Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition, Judd in late 1964 started working on a new series of boxes, which included untitled (DSS 58; Figure 3.2).5 To make this work, Judd assembled two stainless-steel plates and three red transparent plexiglass

Figure 3.2 Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 58), 1965. Fluorescent red plexiglass, stainless steel, and steel cables, 20 × 48 × 33 15/16 in. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, purchase 1978, CX 0083. Source: © 2023 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Christian Bahier/ Philippe Migeat. Digital Image © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

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sheets into a simple rectangular box, eighteen inches tall and four feet long. The artwork, placed directly on the floor, had a smooth and shiny finish. The lustrous gray-metallic stainless-steel sides shimmered, and the red fluorescent plexiglass radiated light, making the box appear like a newly fabricated industrial object. Indeed, Judd made the work with mass-produced materials. For the stainless-steel plates, the artist went to Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties Inc., a family-run shop that was initially located a few blocks from his studio on East 19th Street in Lower Manhattan but had relocated to Long Island by 1965.6 In addition to its usual trade in sheet-metal ventilation ducts, gutters, sinks, and the like, Bernstein Brothers was also available, as advertised on their invoices, for “experimental work of every description.”7 For his plexiglass supply, Judd frequented Allied Plastics, where he could select from the available stock of colors, thick­ nesses, and transparencies.8 While conveying an industrial, mass-produced look, Judd’s box was assembled by hand with the artist’s direct involvement and according to a special system he had de­ vised. The work was held together by five parallel wires that Bernstein Brothers had welded to the inside of the steel plates and fitted with turnbuckles. To assemble the box, the two steel plates were propped up perpendicular to the floor, and then Judd and his assistants inserted the plexiglass sheets that made up the long sides of the box. The turnbuckles were tightened to create the tension that held the four panels together. Fi­ nally, the third plexiglass sheet was placed on top of the rectangular framework, fitting in between the steel plates and resting on the upper edges of the plexiglass sides.9 Judd informally called the works for which he used this construction technique “turnbuckle boxes,” thus setting them apart from subsequent works in which he used plexiglass and various types of metal plates. Judd was deliberate in his selection of materials and construction technique, think­ ing through the visual and conceptual characteristics of this object. He aspired to create an aesthetically conspicuous work that distilled characteristics he associated with the United States as a modern, advanced civilization. In this endeavor he took inspiration from well-engineered structures that embodied a functionalist and economical ethos that Western societies understood as synonymous with social progress. In The Disappearance of Objects, Joshua Shannon convincingly shows that Judd’s work reflected the built envi­ ronment around him, arguing that his minimalist works grappled with the contemporary transformation of New York from a tactile to an abstract city.10 While Judd’s minimal­ ist practice was rooted in the visual and material specifics of the built environment, he produced his early minimal work not only as an expression of the changes taking place around him but as a deliberate effort to convey key aspects of an American society in which science, technology, and engineering were seen as foundational for social advance­ ment. David Raskin, in his monograph on Judd, reveals the importance of pragmatic empiricism in the development of the artist’s socially engaged oeuvre.11 I complicate this American, pragmatic tendency in Judd’s early minimal work, showing that his socially progressive ideals were entangled with a more conservative positionality shaped by white, patriarchal notions of progress. In the article “Specific Objects” (1965), Judd discussed the use of new industrial mate­ rials and techniques in contemporary art.12 Scholars have cited the essay as a key source for the exegesis of minimal art that emphasizes a work’s specific, literal qualities. Yet Judd’s earlier, rarely mentioned text “Kansas City Report” (1963) reveals a more com­ plex understanding of the specific object.13 In the article, Judd conveyed his interest in functional and vernacular structures that were familiar to him from his upbringing in the Midwest. Paralleling Judd’s minimalist boxes from the mid-1960s with the structures he discussed in “Kansas City Report” allows us to see his work as an expression of a

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Twentieth-Century Engineering

functionalist attitude to building—one embedded in a socially conscious rationale of building structures not as excess or waste but as beneficial to the people. Kansas City Report

Judd was a regular contributor to Arts Magazine during the early 1960s. Among his publications “Kansas City Report” holds a special place. As he stated in the introduction to his Complete Writings (1975), the article was one of the few he had proposed on his own.14 The topic of the essay had personal significance: Judd was born in a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1928. At that time, his parents lived on the farm of his maternal grandparents in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, thirty-four miles northeast of the city.15 His father worked for the Western Union Telegraph Company, and the family—after Don­ ald’s birth—moved around the United States, living in Omaha, Des Moines, and Dallas before making their home in Westwood, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City, in 1944. Throughout his childhood Judd returned regularly to the Kansas City area, spending his summers at his grandparents’ farm and continuing to visit as an adult.16 Judd traveled to Kansas City in the spring of 1963 when he visited a pop art exhibition at the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts (now known and hereafter referred to as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art). He returned to the area in August to visit his grandparents, which gave him the opportunity to collect additional material for his report.17 The five-page article appeared four months later in Arts Magazine, just as the Green Gallery in New York presented Judd’s first major solo show, which was crucial to Judd’s career as a recognized artist. The show included four wall-reliefs, two rectangular objects jutting out from the wall, and five wooden geometric boxes placed on the floor (Figure 3.3).18 Thus, the New York art world could read Judd’s words and see his art at the same time. If Judd timed the publication of “Kansas City Re­ port” to coincide with the exhibition, the article holds even greater significance. Judd’s solo show exemplified his move from painting to working in three dimensions. The wooden boxes he exhibited had simple geometric shapes and were painted in a uniform red. One had a horizontal groove, a few were stepped, one included an upright metal grill, and another—untitled (DSS 39; Figure 3.4)—incorporated a pipe. In “Kansas City Report,” Judd conveyed his interest in functional and vernacular structures typical for the Midwest. By paralleling his minimalist boxes from the mid-1960s with the struc­ tures he discussed in “Kansas City Report,” it becomes clear that these untitled works from 1963 did not just emerge out of modernist formalism. Rather they expressed ideals of progress in which technological innovations and economic growth were seen as syn­ onymous with social advancement.19 Judd opened “Kansas City Report” with general remarks about the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City’s main art institution, and he was quick to criticize its beaux­ arts building. Designed in the early 1930s by the firm of Wight and Wight, the building’s four facades featured classical porticos with grand Ionic columns (Figure 3.5).20 He de­ scribed the American version of classically designed museums as “pretentious, expensive, bland and un-architectural”; he continued: “I  think I  hated them the first time I  saw one.” Judd also claimed to remember the 1931 inauguration of the Joslyn Memorial Mu­ seum in Omaha, which featured a grand portico with Ionic columns. Judd would have been barely three years old when the museum opened, yet it seems he had already formed a disparaging opinion of classically inspired buildings.21 Judd contrasted the “pretentious” quality of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art with “the buildings and objects of Kansas City.” Among these he included Watkins Mill, a

Twentieth-Century Engineering

41

Figure 3.3 Installation of Donald Judd’s work at the Green Gallery, New York, December 1963. Source: Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt. Image courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Rudy Burckhardt Papers, 1934–2015, series 2: Photographic Materials, installation view in negative #11, box 7, folder 2, Judd, Donald, ca. 1950–75 © 2023 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Donald Judd Art © 2023 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

mid-nineteenth-century brick structure; the Kansas City Board of Trade Building (1888) designed by noted architect John Wellborn Root; a couple of early twentieth-century houses incorporating prairie style elements by the local architect Louis Curtiss; and the BMA Tower, designed by the Chicago-based firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), completed in 1963. Judd’s eclectic list reveals his preference for bold structures designed with clean, geometric lines that he thought typical of a Midwestern regional aesthetic.22 Among these examples, Watkins Mill seems to have held particular relevance for Judd. The wool mill was located just outside of Excelsior Springs, and when Judd visited his grandparents there in August 1963, it was in the local news. The Watkins Mill Associa­ tion, working with the Clay County Historical Society, had proposed a bond measure to fund the restoration of the mill and its machinery.23 As part of this campaign, the society opened the mill for tours and also produced a postcard (Figure 3.6). Judd sent one of these to his future wife, Julie Finch, commenting, “It’s a strong, square blunt building, like the beams, like your umbrella, my sculpture, two old goblets my mother got me, Da­ vid Hume’s philosophy, certain English furniture, jeeps, MG’s.”24 With just a few words, Judd created a direct analogy between his sculptures and Watkins Mill—and a host of other cherished icons of design and thought. Judd described the mill and its adjacent structures in terms of practicality and local tradition: “The buildings are brick, plain, and typical of the architecture of the 1850’s and 1860’s. The materials and possibilities of construction and obviously the attitudes

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Twentieth-Century Engineering

Figure 3.4 Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 39), 1963. Oil on plywood with iron pipe, 22 1/8 × 45 3/8 × 30 1/2 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Wash­ ington, DC, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1991. Source: © 2023 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth.

Figure 3.5 Thomas and William Wight, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (today known as the Nelson-Atkins Museum), Kansas City, Missouri, 1933. Photograph by Harkins Commercial Photo, 1949. Source: Courtesy Robert Askren photograph collection (P35), Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri.

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Figure 3.6 Postcard featuring drawing of Watkins Mill by Lee Burwell (recto/verso), sent by Donald Judd to Julie Finch, August 26, 1963. Source: © 2023 Judd Foundation/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Julie Finch.

of the builders determined the buildings.”25 He allowed that the builders of Watkins Mill were hardly concerned with the artistic principles of architecture valued at the time, alluding to the beaux-arts style adopted by many American architects during the nine­ teenth century. Yet Judd argued that “the buildings, just boxes, are architecture, a practi­ cal kind; like well-engineered things now” and that a building like Watkins Mill surely qualified as art.26 Judd drew on modern European architectural theory to justify his conclusion, point­ ing out that Le Corbusier had “praised the grain elevators of the Middle West.”27 Judd owned a 1958 French edition of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, known for its

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Figure 3.7 Silos et élévateurs à blé aux États-Unis, from Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, rev. ed. (Éditions Vincent, Fréal, 1958), 18–19; edition owned by Judd. Source: © F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2023. Photograph courtesy Smithso­ nian Libraries.

evocative visual juxtaposition of American industrial buildings and the newest inventions of cars and airplanes with classical temples.28 The German architect Walter Gropius had first reproduced images of American grain elevators and daylight factories in Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes, the annual journal of the German Association of Crafts­ men, in 1913. A decade later Le Corbusier used the same images in Vers une architecture, positing—like Gropius—that such buildings were important beginnings in the develop­ ment of a new architecture (Figure 3.7). With their reproduction in Le Corbusier’s book in 1923, these functional structures, so typical of the American Midwest, found a perma­ nent place in the canon of modern architecture.29 European modernists saw American industrial buildings as manifestations of the country’s progressive sociopolitical attitude. According to Gropius and Le Corbusier, these structures came into being when builders set out to solve a problem in the most ef­ ficient way. For grain elevators, the goal was to produce structures most appropriate for storing grain, resulting in plain, geometric, repeated forms. By following this functional dictum, more structures—be they factories, storage units, or houses—could be built using less material and fewer resources, thus reducing the costs for end users and making more products affordable to a larger segment of the population. Additional labor and expense for decorations that would meet existing fine-art standards were not merely unnecessary but also hampered progress.30 Architects could have found structures similar to American

Twentieth-Century Engineering

45

grain elevators in Europe, particularly in England, which had been at the forefront of industrialization. But as architectural historian Reyner Banham contended, Europeans especially admired the progressive attitude of American society. He described the impact of US industrial buildings on modern architecture as a “form of allegory,” one not solely based on utilitarian concerns but one in which structure and form were interpreted as material expressions of sociopolitical progress.31 Judd followed the argument of modern European architects, positing that industrial structures such as Watkins Mill emerged from America’s sociopolitical system. For Judd, the functional, vernacular built environment best reflected the attitudes of the people and provided him with inspiration for his art. “Even things with less art, in the sense of developed art, than these [grain elevators of the Middle West] show the motivations of art, and, since they are alive, are interesting, far more than they merit maybe, perhaps as much as great art.”32 According to his narrative, the built environment of Kansas City— and more generally the Midwest—came to represent an honest expression of American practicality and ingenuity, traits that promised economic and social progress. Considered in the context of “Kansas City Report,” Judd’s sculptures in his Green Gallery show may be seen to qualify—like the Midwestern buildings he described—as an aesthetic expression of the functionalist ethos that Europeans admired in American industry. The everyday built environment shaped Judd’s art: he drew on forms that sig­ nified advancement within a historically specific, white, capitalist, and male-dominated society. At the same time, he used his forms to convey meaning. In an interview with the critic and editor Bruce Hooton in 1965, Judd explained, Whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people’s art work one way or another; it’s very remote or it isn’t. It’s remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness. . . . I suppose I work in a way within limits of ordinariness. Those limits come from what’s around you.33 In this light, Judd made work that fit within the trajectory of a specifically American art—a valid successor to not only abstract expressionism but also American regionalism, a movement that embraced an idealistic anti-elitism associated with Midwestern values. Like regionalist artists during the 1930s, Judd positioned himself as an American who had the capacity to express deep-rooted national characteristics in his art. In “Kansas City Report,” Judd mentioned the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton among a list of the city’s residents and collectors who took an interest in local art. Indeed, like Ben­ ton, Judd could claim Midwestern roots and a middle-class background. But instead of depicting people and landscapes, Judd appropriated the forms and materials he thought best expressed American ideals of advancement. Judd’s appreciation for the Midwestern values he found in Watkins Mill, however, was disconnected from the labor history of the site. As he learned from the caption on the back of the postcard he sent to Finch, the bricks used in the mill’s construction were “made on the farm by slave labor.” The Watkins family’s successful operation of the mill, local historians clarified, relied on class- and race-based hierarchies. Furthermore, workers endured long shifts, and the spinning machines caused many injuries. As a con­ sequence, workers lost their jobs, along with prospects for future employment.34 Thus, the hoped-for social progress promised by technology that Judd intuited in the mill build­ ing was tainted by capitalist exploitation. Judd’s stance was based on an overtly positive functionalist and formalist—rather than critical sociological—position, as his comments on the postcard revealed. He compared the rectangular brick building with well-made

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things that served a functional purpose and therefore corresponded to Judd’s admiration of Hume’s empiricist philosophy. In a 1964 review, Judd contended: Most practical things are much betterlooking [sic] than things designed to be elegant. The best part of most houses and buildings is the wiring and plumbing. Usually the more important an object is thought to be and the more it is designed to be elegant, the worse it is.35 Within Judd’s worldview, the visual form of Watkins Mill derived organically from the builders’ aspiration to construct the most efficient structure. Judd consciously chose these forms for his art to express notions of American progress that were intimately linked to a functionalist, pragmatic attitude while ignoring—at this stage in his life—that these forms and practices perpetuated reigning hierarchies of class and race. American, Popular, Minimal

In “Kansas City Report,” Judd expressed dismay over not just the architecture of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art but also its collection, which at the time focused on his­ torical, non-American masterpieces. He complained that the museum thought “only dead art was art,” explaining that the collection policy was limited by the original be­ quest’s requirement that “an artist must be dead for twenty years before his work may be purchased.” He called such a collecting philosophy “otherworldly,” “fantastic,” and “incredible.”36 Judd was pleased, however, to see the museum’s exhibition Popular Art: Artistic Projections of Common American Symbols. While not providing an in-depth re­ view, Judd cited the show throughout his report, suggesting it was an important anchor for his own thinking. Featuring the work of artists who referenced objects, structures, and events that were contemporary and American, the exhibition resonated with the ideas Judd raised in “Kansas City Report.” In the catalog for Popular Art, Ralph Coe, the museum’s curator of painting and sculp­ ture, emphasized that the works captured contemporary American life. Myles Patrick Jensen, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist were among those artists who took their subject matter from everyday culture, painting consumer items advertised on billboards, events and personalities projected on TV, or scenes taken from comic strips. In addition to stressing subject matter, Coe was careful to present the works as stylistically innovative. He cited Claes Oldenburg’s painted plaster objects, represented in the exhibition by U.S.A. Flag (1960), as exemplary in this regard.37 Its red stripes and blue rectangle formally ref­ erenced color field abstraction, while the splattered paint application and organic shape were reminiscent of action painting. In addition, Oldenburg developed the painterly idiom of abstract expressionism into a more decidedly three-dimensional, sculptural mode. Coe, like Judd, operated within a modernist framework, wherein avant-garde art was judged on formal-aesthetic innovation. Judd believed that the art of his own time had to go beyond figurative depictions if it was to be taken seriously as advanced art. In the interview with Hooton, Judd agreed on the quality of Jackson Pollock’s paintings, but when Hooton suggested that Edward Hopper was of the same stature, Judd disagreed, explaining that Hopper “was too late to do what he was doing and do it first rate.” He elaborated: I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it’s very complicated. I’d like to present this more forcefully than Hopper, but not as description.38

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On the one hand, Judd’s concern for the commonplace aligned his minimalist work with tendencies in pop art. He shared pop artists’ interest in incorporating objects and ma­ terials from everyday life, aspiring to create art that was contemporary and American. On the other hand, he was cautious not to represent mass-produced consumer goods. In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), Greenberg not only had dismissed figurative art but also put it on a par with products of lowbrow culture. Thus, in contrast to pop artists, Judd sought to present quotidian American life in abstract form. Four months after Judd’s Green Gallery exhibition, Andy Warhol showcased his own specific, three-dimensional objects that—consciously or not—mocked Judd’s highminded social ambitions. Entering Warhol’s solo show at the Stable Gallery that opened on April 21, 1964, visitors found themselves surrounded by Brillo Boxes (1964) stacked from floor to ceiling. Nathan Gluck, who worked as an assistant for Warhol from 1955 to 1965, recalled, When he wanted to do his box sculptures, he sent me across to the A&P [supermarket] and said, “Get me some boxes.” I came back with things that were very artsy, maybe a Blue Parrot pineapple box or something like that. And he said, “No, no, no. I want something very ordinary, very common.” So he went back and got a Brillo box.39 Using a commercially fabricated item as a model, Warhol created sculptures that, like Judd’s abstract works, replicated a simple geometric shape; unlike Judd, however, Warhol unequivocally entangled his art within capitalist consumer culture.40 Critics associated Judd’s minimalist works, despite their abstract character, with quasifunctional structures. Brian O’Doherty, writing for The New York Times, described the objects in Judd’s Green Gallery show as “red wooden-shelved constructions with oc­ casional grills, washboards with curved, aluminum-covered ends, pipes running hither and tither [sic].” The critic, however, did not intend these descriptions as complimentary, concluding that “it is not necessary to attack this show. It obligingly expires before ones [sic] eyes, in a form of suicide some may find of interest.”41 Similarly, Irving Sandler, a long-standing supporter of abstract expressionism, described the exhibition as “a de­ pressing one” and commented, “There is little room for man’s spirit in this world of dumb things.”42 Neither critic took into account that Judd had painted his sculptures in bright cadmium red. They did not elaborate on what Barbara Rose called an “eyesplitting orange-red” or what Lucy Lippard experienced as “dramatic.”43 One would have been startled to step into the Green Gallery, housed on the top floor of a brownstone on West 57th Street, and find bright red boxes standing out against the white gallery interior.44 A few years later O’Doherty would write an influential series of essays on the “white cube,” but in 1963 he did not pay much heed to how the bright red color and the gallery setting itself transported these functional-looking pieces into the world of art.45 Rose and Lippard accordingly positioned Judd’s art as the most recent development of the avant-garde. These abstract, three-dimensional works, they claimed, advanced the modernist trajectory as a valid successor to abstract expressionism. Even Michael Fried, who just a few years later would make his reputation as one of the most ardent critics of minimal art, was intrigued by Judd’s work, writing “As one might expect on the strength of Judd’s monthly criticism in Arts Magazine it is an assured, intelligent show . . . one of the best on view in New York this month.”46 Sidney Tillim contextualized Judd’s work within a trajectory of contemporary American art, discussing a show by abstract expres­ sionist artist Franz Kline before reviewing the work of Frank Stella and then Judd. Tillim interpreted the work of the two younger artists as reactions to the emotional excesses of abstract expressionism. He noted their interests in extending the object-quality of

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painting, thus dispensing with the remaining vestiges of illusion in art and advancing the modernist trajectory of painting as prescribed by Greenberg.47 Still, Tillim had some reservations about Judd’s work. He noted the “retrograde char­ acter of the materials,” specifically citing Judd’s use of galvanized iron in the wall reliefs, as, for example, in the curved top and bottom edges of untitled (DSS 42; 1963). As Joshua Shannon has shown, these works referenced the cornices of the cast-iron build­ ings in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, where Judd lived at the time.48 Like Watkins Mill, SoHo’s cast-iron structures were integral to the story of American industrial pro­ gress (see Chapter 4). However, by 1963 galvanized iron was anything but new. Simi­ larly, the materials Judd used to make his red floor boxes were old-fashioned. Neither the wooden material nor the appropriated metal pipe and metal grill were specifically contemporary. Further, the works were constructed with techniques humans had used for centuries. Judd’s use of cadmium red paint was also retrograde. The pigment had been invented during the early nineteenth century as a byproduct of zinc smelting, and the French Impressionists were attracted to its intense hue. Henri Matisse, for example, had a predilection for cadmium red, using it in many of his most successful paintings, such as The Red Studio (1911).49 In 1963, neither Judd’s galvanized iron wall-reliefs nor his wooden floor boxes seemed terribly contemporary in a century that had seen the rise of such materials as acrylic paints, plastics, and stainless steel. Twentieth-Century Engineering

Judd subsequently updated the look of his ordinary boxes to make them appear more contemporary. The Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition of 1964 became an im­ portant touchstone in this endeavor. The show resonated with his sensibilities, confirm­ ing ideas he had addressed in “Kansas City Report” and providing inspiration for the further development of his art. The exhibition, curated by Arthur Drexler, was divided into eight sections: dams; spillways and tunnels; earthworks and canals; instruments and machinery; columns and roofs; towers; domes and vaults; and finally bridges, viaducts, and roads (Figure  3.8).50 Informative panels for each project—including photographic images, plans, sections, and details such as location, credits, and structural and mate­ rial facts—were displayed around the perimeter walls of the gallery space. In addition, Drexler chose about sixty of what he considered the most outstanding projects, which he reproduced as large individual photographs or photo murals hung on the central walls of the galleries. Among these were an enormous image of the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahl­ avi Dam, later renamed to Dez Dam, which transported the monumental size typical of engineering feats into the gallery space (Figure 3.9). Other highlighted projects included Victor Lundy’s inflatable AEC Pavilion and the Theodor Heuss Bridge in Düsseldorf. Drexler skillfully framed engineering structures as aesthetic objects. The large pho­ tographic images portraying individual structures removed them from the everyday, functional context in the built environment. Dams, bridges, highways, and the like could be assessed by visitors as works of art. In an introductory wall text, Drexler wrote, “Engineering produces individual masterpieces, as beautiful, for example, as the Santa Luzia Dam in Portugal, or the Theodor Heuss Bridge.”51 To emphasize this fine-arts connection, Drexler presented a pristine white three-foot-tall model of the Pahlavi Dam on a pedestal as the single spotlighted object—easily mistaken for a sculpture—in the exhibition’s entrance niche (Figure  3.10).52 The model and large photographs emphasized the visual appeal of the projects so that the general public could appreciate them without the prerequisite of technical knowledge. The MoMA press release boasted of the installation’s innovative design, explaining that “in effect

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Figure 3.8 Installation view of Twentieth Century Engineering, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1964, showing room with bridges. Source: Photograph by George Cserna. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 3.9 Photomural of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam (today known as Dez Dam), Iran, 1963, installed in Twentieth Century Engineering, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1964. Source: Photograph by George Cserna. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 3.10 Model of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam (today known as Dez Dam), ca. 1964. Painted wood, height: 36 inches. Installation view of Twentieth Century Engineering, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1964. Source: Photograph by George Cserna. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

two simultaneous exhibitions are on view; one for visitors with a general interest in the subject and one for specialists.”53 But as a whole, the exhibition devoted significantly more attention to the visual-aesthetic qualities of the engineering structures than to the technical data relevant for engineers. Still, Drexler was keen to emphasize the significant roles these engineering feats played in the well-being of society. “The problems engineers solve,” he explained, “cut across economics, politics, art and science, affecting the lives of all men—on this planet now and eventually somewhere else as well.”54 While Drexler did not enumerate the social benefits of these projects, their impacts were implicit in their functions. The Pahlavi Dam generated hydroelectric power for thousands of Iranians and supplied water to irrigate the surrounding areas, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes made it possible to quickly and economically build open and expansive spaces that could be adapted for a wide vari­ ety of purposes, and the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope enabled scientists to explore the physical and chemical properties of the sun. Drexler understood engineering as a method of solving problems, making it “among the most rewarding of the arts not only because it produces individual masterpieces . . . but also because it is an art grounded in social responsibility.”55 For all his advocacy, Drexler was aware of problems that came with realizing large engineering projects. In his essay for the catalog, he chided engineers and architects for favoring monumental forms that disregarded human needs: “It is this conflict between the traditional scale of houses and even cities, and the new scale of industrial build­ ings, highways, and dams that we have not yet resolved.”56 Citing the example of a

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279-foot-tall cooling tower in Carling, France, Drexler pointed at the discrepancy be­ tween the monumental tower and the houses seen in the background of the displayed photograph. “Small houses nearby, unhappily dwarfed, must finally seem to us a petty distraction, and we may imagine the landscape’s equilibrium restored by removal of the houses rather than the towers.”57 Drexler’s ironic, hypothetical suggestion to remove the homes of people reveals his predilection for aesthetic concerns. He concluded the essay by stating that “Today we lack the political and economic apparatus that would facilitate a truly responsible use of our technology. But it may be that a more skillful and humane use of engineering depends on a more knowledgeable response to its poetry.”58 In this, as architectural historian Felicity Scott pointed out, Twentieth Century Engineering dis­ played a “problematic aestheticization of technology.”59 When considering the cooling tower in Carling, Drexler focused on its form in relation to its surroundings but did not elaborate on its function or potential impacts. The tower was part of a petrochemical plant where petroleum and natural gas were transformed into benzene and ethylene used to produce—among other things—plexiglass and polyester. Drexler ignored the possible dangers to human health and pollution produced by the plant; neither did he address economic issues, such as the value of the materials produced, benefits from new jobs, or the decrease in value of adjacent properties. Twentieth Century Engineering was a popular and highly praised exhibition. The New York Times covered the show extensively, and journals such as the Architectural Record, International Science and Technology, Engineering News-Record, and Nation’s Cities all assessed the exhibition in positive terms and included numerous photographs of select structures. Industrial Design published one of the few critical reviews, com­ plaining that the exhibition neither provided technical rationales nor explained the so­ cial significance of the projects, but the journal still praised the presented structures.60 After its successful reception in New York, the exhibition traveled to more than forty venues, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles (now California Science Center), and numerous locations in Europe.61 In his review for Arts Magazine, Judd concurred with the majority of reviewers in his overall praise of the exhibited structures. Following Drexler’s argument, he empha­ sized that the engineer’s attitude to building produced a specifically contemporary visual expression. Of the engineering structures in the exhibition, he wrote, “It is hard not to see these projects as the last word in science. They are almost the only visible science and so are apparently the truth of the present and the beginning of that of the future.”62 Bridges, dams, highways, domes, tunnels, and towers were designed according to physi­ cal principles, such as gravity and weight, the properties of materials, and their densities and load-bearing capacities. Discoveries relating to new building methods and materials were incorporated into designing more efficient, stronger, and larger structures to more effectively and economically solve the issues facing modern society. Judd suggested that these developments determined the visible forms of engineering, imbuing their design with a contemporary quality. Such structures, however, were not only based on scientific, functional principles but also involved aesthetic choices. Judd emphasized the role of subjective preferences, argu­ ing that “engineering is not as objective as it appears; it’s not all science; it’s partly art.”63 He supported his assessment by comparing a number of the different bridges showcased in the Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition. The Schwandbach Bridge was an

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Figure 3.11 Theodor Heuss Bridge, Düsseldorf, Germany, 1957, schematic drawing. The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Source: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

arched concrete structure with a curved deck that emphasized curvilinear forms. By con­ trast, the Theodor Heuss Bridge—a cable-stayed structure whose deck is suspended from steel pylons—consisted mostly of perpendicular members (Figure 3.11, and photo mural in Figure 3.8).64 Judd inferred that the differences between these bridges indicated that architects and engineers not only objectively solved functional problems but also made subjective or aesthetic choices during the process. While taking inspiration from the work of engineers, Judd was careful not to entirely obliterate the boundary between avant-garde art and engineering, arguing that “it is bet­ ter to consider art and non-art one thing and make the distinctions ones of degree.”65 Those distinctions Judd described in terms of forms being more or less particular. He un­ derstood art to be more “specific”—he also used the word “particular”—than functional objects or structures. Calling art more specific than non-art meant that its forms changed in response to the times and places of their occurrences; avant-garde art was to be novel and ever changing. The forms of non-art, by contrast, remained more or less the same because they simply needed to be functional. The basic shape of a spoon, for example, had not changed significantly over many centuries because its function had remained the same.66 Judd situated architecture between art and engineering. He observed, however, that this order was somewhat disrupted because architects were adhering to old traditions of design and decoration, whereas engineers were experimenting with and employing new materials and methods. Judd wrote that “most buildings are far inferior to engineering projects, which with their definite use and the supposed objectivity of their solutions, have been allowed a freedom and advancement not accorded to buildings and architecture.”67

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He pointed to the work of the inventor, engineer, and architect Buckminster Fuller as exemplifying the disjunction between the fields of architecture and engineering. Since the 1920s, Fuller had been experimenting with novel, contemporary materials and tech­ niques, and in the postwar era became well known for his design of the geodesic dome, five of which were featured in Twentieth Century Engineering. The Missouri Botanical Garden Climatron, built in 1960 in St. Louis, was one of the most recent and largest examples of the application of Fuller’s geodesic principles, here interpreted by local ar­ chitects Wayne Mackey Sr. and Joseph Murphy. In his review of the show, Judd called Fuller’s work more “interesting” than what was commonly referred to as architecture, and he admonished the profession for not recognizing Fuller as an architect. Judd clearly favored the advancement pursued in the field of engineering over current architectural practices. While Judd was excited about the structures presented in the exhibition, he noted that, “Excessive though genuine elegance also marred this exhibition, which, like most Mu­ seum of Modern Art shows, was overly dramatic, somewhat pretentious.”68 It seems that Judd was aware of the discrepancy between the structures as presented in the exhibition and their gritty reality as part of people’s everyday lives. Drexler’s aesthetic choices— the use of black-and-white rather than color photographs, dim lighting, the spotlighted model of Pahlavi Dam—heightened the sense of elegance emanating from the exhibition. Indeed, the context of MoMA’s pristine museum space helped to convey the techno­ utopian, aestheticized perspective that Drexler promoted. As he wrote, “Even engineer­ ing’s worst offenses—superhighways, for example—are often intrinsically beautiful and suggest answers to some of the problems they now help to perpetuate.”69 Drexler pointed to the crucial role of industrial and architectural design in shaping the environment, but his assessment remained aloof from people’s lived experiences. Turnbuckle Boxes

Shortly after seeing Twentieth Century Engineering, Judd experimented with new materi­ als and techniques. He assembled plexiglass sheets and steel plates to create a series of three structurally innovative floor boxes, culminating in untitled (DSS 58; Figure 3.2). The result was a conspicuous work of art that looked decidedly contemporary and ex­ pressed values integral to Judd’s understanding of America. While he succeeded in updat­ ing his earlier wooden floor boxes, the new materials he employed not only alluded to scientific and technological advances but were also inseparable from corporate power and the military-industrial complex that complicated their avant-garde, socially progres­ sive associations. Indeed, in a 1965 essay, Robert Smithson drew attention to the materi­ alist context of Judd’s turnbuckle boxes, naming not only Bernstein Brothers and Allied Plastics as the local shops frequented by Judd but also identifying the materials as BETH­ CON metal and Rohm and Hass Plexiglas. By associating plexiglass and steel with multi­ national companies, Smithson alluded to alienated labor as a precondition of Judd’s art.70 Plexiglas, a trademark name for acrylic glass, was invented by the German American company Rohm and Haas as an economical alternative to glass. Like glass, it had trans­ parent qualities but was much cheaper to produce. It also came with the advantages of being lightweight, flexible, and shatter resistant. German chemist and company partner Otto Röhm experimented with the polymerization of various chemical raw materials that derived from petroleum and in 1932 produced a strong solid sheet, which the company named Plexiglas. In contrast to earlier plastics, such as celluloid or cellulose acetate,

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which were made from natural polymers rather than a synthetic polymerization pro­ cess, Plexiglas neither yellowed, nor did it become brittle at low temperatures. By 1936 Rohm and Hass sold their optically flawless and transparent sheets of Plexiglas in the United States.71 The firm advertised the use of Plexiglas for windows in aircrafts and secured contracts with the aviation industry and the US military. The advent of World War II dramatically increased the demand for Plexiglas and furthered the development of new production techniques, expanding the material’s application to gun turrets in fighter planes and submarine periscopes. In the postwar period Plexiglas was used in the industrial fabrication of household appliances, furniture, and greenhouses, as well as in Fuller’s geodesic domes. For untitled (DSS 58), Judd chose plexiglass of a red fluorescent color—a decidedly contemporary hue not commercially produced until the mid-twentieth century. Joseph and Robert Switzer, sons of a California pharmacist, first experimented with paints that glowed in the dark during the 1930s, mixing naturally occurring fluorescent minerals and chemicals with shellac. With the help of chemist Richard Ward, the Switzer brothers used synthetic resins to create a dye that glowed in the dark and also worked in daylight, radiating an intense hue that was much brighter than regular colors.72 By 1937, the Switzer brothers had moved to Cleveland, where they opened a company specializing in the production of these dyes. During World War II, the US military found ample uses for fluorescent colors—be it for signal flags, emergency rescue equipment, or vests for airfield crews—increasing the demand for the Switzers’ products. In the postwar era, Switzer Brothers Inc. marketed their daylight fluorescent dyes under the trademark Day-Glo, which were soon enough employed in billboards, traffic signs, magazine covers, clothing, paints, and plexiglass. Frank Stella and Andy Warhol started using fluorescent Day-Glo paints in 1964 for the Moroccan Paintings and Flowers series, respectively.73 Stainless-steel was another key material of Judd’s turnbuckle boxes. The development of a steel alloy—principally involving chromium—that was resistant to corrosion dated to the early twentieth century. American inventor Elwood Haynes received a patent for ferritic stainless steel in 1919 and soon after collaborated with Harry Brearley, who had worked on the same idea in England, to form the American Stainless Steel Corporation headquartered in Pittsburgh. Due to its high chromium content (12 to 25 percent) and a more complicated production process, stainless steel was more expensive than other types of steel, and for that reason it was rarely used as the load-bearing material in large structures. However, it found wide application in industrial equipment, machine parts, cookware, and cutlery.74 Judd assembled his turnbuckle boxes with an innovative technique that he had en­ countered in Twentieth Century Engineering. The exhibition included a number of cablestayed bridges that were invented during the 1950s. One of the most impressive examples was the 500-foot-long Theodor Heuss Bridge (Figure 3.11) that featured in the exhibition as a large wall mural. In these cable-stayed bridges, the bridge deck was suspended from high-strength steel cables stretched over vertical steel pylons whereby the gravitational weight of the deck itself created the counterforce that held up the deck. The main suspen­ sion cables did not have to be anchored to the banks of the river, as was the case with traditional suspension bridges. Judd’s interest in these bridges is evidenced in his review of Twentieth Century Engineering, where they first served as examples of engineers mak­ ing not just scientific but also aesthetic choices, and then appear in his enumeration of favorite structures that concludes the review.75 The importance of cable-stayed bridges to Judd is further verified in the publication of his Complete Writings in 1975, where he

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included images of two such structures. (None appeared in the original review printed in Arts Magazine.)76 Judd’s adaptation of the cable-stayed principle in his turnbuckle boxes had a fittingly functional genesis (Figure 3.12). In a 1971 interview with John Coplans, Judd recalled that “the floor boxes with plastic sides and top started out in a practical way. I wanted them to be portable, and shippable—a knockdown piece. Thus they are designed to be taken apart.”77 The ability to easily assemble and disassemble such an object was advantageous when shipping the piece to different exhibitions. In a 1965 article, critic Barbara Rose observed that sculptures were exhibited less frequently than paintings because transporting them was more difficult and expensive; she also noted the ad­ ditional resources required to store sculptures because they took up more space than paintings.78 Thinking like an engineer, Judd encountered a challenge and found an ef­ ficient solution. The innovative, contemporary design that Judd devised for his “knockdown” boxes initially failed. He exhibited the first example, which he completed in late 1964, as part of a group show at the Green Gallery, but as specified in the catalogue raisonné, the steel plates had to be refabricated a few months later. The second example was included in Plastics, an exhibition at the John Daniels Gallery in early 1965, but it broke while on view. Judd refined the design of his boxes and wire system with the help of Bernstein Brothers and fabricated the third turnbuckle box in time to replace the broken sculpture

Figure 3.12 Turnbuckle and wire system of Donald Judd’s untitled (DSS 83), 1965. Fluorescent yellow plexiglass, stainless steel, and steel cables, 20 × 48 × 33 15/16 in. The Rachof­ sky Collection Dallas, Texas (previously thought to be untitled, DSS 58). Source: © 2023 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by author.

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in the Plastics show. The component parts of the third turnbuckle box were shipped to San Francisco later that year, where they were—as far as we know—assembled and ex­ hibited without trouble. Judd had devised a sculpture that could be shipped economically to venues across the country and beyond.79 Specific Objects

Owing to the materials and techniques used to create untitled (DSS 58), the work is, ac­ cording to Judd’s terms, “specific”—denoting its historic specificity or contemporaneity. In “Kansas City Report,” Judd stipulated that art be specific to its times. He developed this meaning of “specific” in his review of Twentieth Century Engineering and continued to em­ phasize that meaning in his essay “Specific Objects” (1965).80 There Judd called materials such as plexiglass, formica, and cold-rolled steel “specific,” emphasizing their newness in terms of technological innovation and artistic use. Of recent three-dimensional art, he said, Most of the work involves new materials, either recent inventions or things not used before in art. Little was done until lately with the wide range of industrial products. Almost nothing has been done with industrial techniques. . . . Dan Flavin, who uses fluorescent lights, has appropriated the results of industrial production.81 “Specific Objects” is a key text that positioned the new three-dimensional art as ex­ panding the narrow, self-referential trajectory of Greenbergian modernism beyond me­ dium specificity. Scholars have cited the essay as a key source for the exegesis of minimal art that emphasizes a work’s literal quality, thereby, however, neglecting the more com­ plex meaning of “specific” that Judd developed in the context of architectural and en­ gineering discourses. His ambition to create work that was specifically contemporary as well as American was an equally important aspect of his theory and practice during the mid-1960s and evident in “Kansas City Report” and his review of Twentieth Century Engineering. Indeed, he was willing to compromise the literalness of his art in favor of creating contemporary-looking objects that expressed notions of functionality he under­ stood to be integral to modern America. The nuances of Judd’s thinking are illuminated in his dual framing of plexiglass. He favored the material’s contemporary, industrial qualities but had reservations about its unobjective or “slippery” characteristics. In the 1971 interview with Coplans, the artist explained, “I have very ambivalent feelings about plexiglass and don’t like it too much as a material. In part it’s a sort of slippery and slightly disagreeable material.”82 The negative, slippery quality of plexiglass stood in contrast to materials that Judd described as literal or objective, such as hot- or cold-rolled steel plates.83 The latter are irreducibly hard and solid and have clearly defined edges; we tend to see them simply as steel plates rather than being dazzled by the illusions created by the light they absorb and reflect. Shinier or translucent materials, such as stainless steel and plexiglass, more readily evoke spatial illusions that complicate their materiality. Transparent plexiglass of a fluorescent color pushes this nonliteral quality to the extreme, reflecting and transmitting light and emanating color beyond its material boundaries, seemingly losing its objective quality.84 In “Specific Objects,” Judd pointed to what he identified as the “unobjective” qualities of materials. The passage in which he emphasized the direct use of materials includes an acknowledgment of their “unobjective” uses: Materials vary greatly and are simply materials—formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used

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directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objec­ tivity to the obdurate identity of a material. Also, of course, the qualities of mate­ rials—hard mass, soft mass, thickness of 1/32, 1/16, 1/8 inch, pliability, slickness, translucency, dullness—have unobjective uses.85 In Judd’s terminology, plexiglass is specific in that it is a tactile, contemporary material, yet it is also unobjective, slippery, or slightly disagreeable; plexiglass is characterized by an optical ambiguity that transcends its literalness. Untitled (DSS 58) was the third in a series of turnbuckle boxes begun by Judd shortly after seeing Twentieth Century Engineering. The changes Judd implemented in these boxes were not limited to technical improvement as discussed but show him moving toward what he had called disagreeable, unobjective, or nonobdurate materials. The first two boxes were constructed with pebbled plexiglass—using orange sheets and turquoise sheets, respectively—that was neither transparent nor fluorescent (Figure 3.13). In con­ trast to transparent plexiglass, pebbled plexiglass has a milky surface and transmits little light, so that it remains more obdurate as a material. In addition, for the short sides of the first two boxes, Judd used hot-rolled steel, which has a muted, dull surface in contrast to the polished luster of stainless steel. The shiny, transparent, and fluorescent qualities of the third turnbuckle box compromised the work’s literalness, but they gave it a definite contemporary look, thus strengthening the visual expressiveness of the work. Untitled (DSS 58) was not only made of contemporary materials but also looked like a new, in­ dustrially fabricated work.86

Figure 3.13 Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 53), 1964. Orange pebbled acrylic sheets, hot-rolled steel, and steel cables, 22 × 45 1/4 × 30 1/2 in. Private Collection. Source: © 2023 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Judd Foundation and David Zwirner.

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Judd’s use of industrial materials and techniques endowed his work with an undeni­ ably up-to-date, avant-garde quality, one that conveyed notions of technological progress that in the United States was closely associated with social advancement. In 1965, Walter Hopps included Judd’s work in the American exhibition for the eighth São Paulo Bien­ nial in Brazil. At the time director at the Pasadena Museum of Art, Hopps was appointed by the US Information Agency (USIA) to curate the exhibition. He paired the older and much-revered artist Barnett Newman with six younger painters and sculptors: Frank Stella, Larry Poons, and Judd from New York and Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin from Los Angeles. Hopps thus positioned the new objectlike paintings and sculptures by this new generation as advancing the geometric, abstract work of New­ man and abstract expressionism more generally. Hopps explained that “there is a strong individuality in each” but that “together they represent one of the important positions at which contemporary painting and sculpture has now arrived.”87 Just as the USIA had exhibited and framed abstract expressionism internationally to convey notions of Ameri­ can individuality and freedom, Hopps’s selection for the São Paulo Biennial—a major international art event on par with the Venice Biennale—came with the expectation that the works stood for or articulated common national characteristics. In this context, to “represent” did not denote figurative depiction but rather that the works expressed quali­ ties considered fundamentally American. After the closing of the biennial, the American exhibition was shipped to Washington, DC, to be presented at the Smithsonian Institu­ tion’s National Collection of Fine Art (today the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or SAAM), a public venue that shaped the perimeters of what was considered American art. Judd was aware that defining what qualified as specifically American was a com­ plex issue. In February 1965, shortly before it was announced that his work was to be included in the American exhibition for São Paulo, the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art asked Bruce Hooton to conduct an interview with Judd as part of its oral history program. In the interview, Judd voiced his concern about repre­ senting a nation as diverse as the United States. While his work may have been shaped by what America looked like, Judd pointed out that he was just one individual and therefore not capable of creating an artwork that objectively expressed the state of an entire nation: You have the big problem that you don’t very exactly represent the United States, or the culture. You’re in it and it gets mixed up in what you’re doing, but you’re one out of the other 200 million and you only know little parts of it and I think no one is going to represent it in a very broad, grand way. Anyway the culture is not only American.88 Hooton countered that a writer like “Tolstoy, to my mind, represents Russia.” Judd responded, You tend to associate the quality of the period with what’s lasted—what’s still good. And that quality becomes the whole period. Whatever didn’t get written about or painted just goes. . . . I don’t much like the idea of representing the United States in my work. It’s just that you live here and you are involved in your sense of what’s around you—your sense of what’s ordinary, for example, that I talked about.89 This exchange highlights Judd’s predicament. On one hand, he valued the ordinary built environment as an expression of the common American ideals of functionality,

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rationality, and economic progress. On the other hand, he questioned the notion of a national American style as it had been propagated for abstract expressionism. His doubt vis-à-vis a stylistically unified American avant-garde movement itself emerged out of the deep-seated national creed of individual freedom. In the United States, artists’ ambiva­ lence towards representing their own country during the 1960s also developed in concert with a growing distrust in national politics and the mounting anti-American sentiment abroad. As an individual, Judd paid particular attention to the everyday built environ­ ment around him, and as a white American artist, who benefited from the reigning no­ tions of economic and technological progress, he favored structures that expressed a functionalist, pragmatic approach to building. In the 1963 essay “Kansas City Report,” he had focused on Midwestern vernacu­ lar architecture, observing that “there hasn’t been a spate of curtain-wall buildings [in Kansas City]. . . . It is growing laterally, not vertically.”90 But during the course of the 1960s, as Judd further advanced his minimalist sculptures, his view of what constituted the everyday built environment evolved. By 1965 he had not only been living in Manhat­ tan for five years, where tall buildings were erected all around him, but also had seen the Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition. Featured prominently in that show was SOM, a notably successful American firm with a reputation for uniting principles of engineering and architecture. Examples included the Air Force Academy Dining Hall in Colorado Springs (1961); the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, built on a mountaintop in Arizona; the United Airlines Executive Office Building in Elk Grove Township, Illinois (both of 1962); and the design for the Chicago Civic Center, to be completed in 1965. For the latter, SOM (working with C. F. Murphy Associates and Loebl, Schlossman & Ben­ nett) devised a steel skeleton frame with stringer and girder trusses and stepped cruciform columns that pushed the structural and technological boundaries of building; the design resulted in structural bays measuring forty-eight by eighty-seven feet—the largest in any office building to date. While not included in Twentieth Century Engineering, the Lever House in Manhattan constituted SOM’s most iconic glass-curtain wall tower. Completed in 1952 and designed by the firm’s Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois, it was—after the United Nations Sec­ retariat Building—the second glass-curtain wall structure to be erected in Manhattan.91 Located on Park Avenue and East 53rd Street, the twenty-four-story building was com­ missioned by Lever Brothers, a British soap company, to serve as its American headquar­ ters. In their design, Bunshaft and de Blois followed the principles of the international style as developed by European modern architects, in particular Mies van der Rohe, who in the 1920s had rendered his visions of a modern, transparent glass tower in his competition entry for the Friedrichstrasse skyscraper in Berlin. After immigrating to the United States, where he received an appointment at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, Mies had the opportunity to design (with Philip Johnson) his own iconic glass-curtain wall tower in Manhattan. Completed in 1958, the Seagram Building stood diagonally across from the Lever House on Park Avenue. The work of Mies played a central role in Twentieth Century Engineering. Drexler highlighted the architect’s work in his catalog introduction, praising the German émigré for having united ideas of engineering and architecture: “It is this post-World War II phase of Mies’s work that has brought architecture closer to engineering than ever before.”92 Drexler positioned the glass-curtain wall tower as the perfect example of “architecture as structure,” whereby the visual form of the building was determined by the load-bearing steel skeleton. Structure was not hidden behind a facade but remained visible through

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the glass curtain wall. In Twentieth Century Engineering, Drexler emphasized the idea of “architecture as structure” by presenting a photograph that showed Mies’s 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments under construction—displaying the building’s unfinished steel skeleton—even though it had been completed thirteen years earlier, in 1951. In his catalog essay, Drexler was keen to tie Mies’s achievement to American prec­ edents, noting the indebtedness of modern European architecture to the functionalist ethos of American industry. While the exhibition was international in its reach, the cat­ alog pointed to American origins, the plate section opening with none other than an example of Kansas City grain elevators. In his review, Judd praised examples from Ger­ many, France, Venezuela, and China, but, like Drexler, he stressed the American origin of twentieth-century advancements in engineering. Judd provided a chronological list of a few selected examples that began with the Kansas City grain elevators. While acknowl­ edging the transnational dialogue that led to new techniques and materials, both Drexler and Judd constructed a narrative of technological, social, and aesthetic advancement that was fundamentally American, one written from a nationalist, white, and patriarchal point of view. For all their talk of functionalism—as Judd emphasized—engineers and modern ar­ chitects made subjective, aesthetic choices, and used materials in expressive—or, to use Judd’s term, “unobjective”—ways.93 There are, for example, practical reasons to tint the facades of glass-curtain wall towers: the tint reduces the impact of solar heat while al­ lowing natural light to flood the interior, providing the main light source during working hours. However, functional premises do not prescribe a specific color. Bunshaft and de Blois designed the Lever House with a bluish-green glass facade that—as Lewis Mumford contended in a review from the late 1950s—was a perfect symbol for a company whose main business was the production of soap and detergent.94 Mies also readily incorporated nonfunctional aspects in his building designs, most notably placing structurally superflu­ ous I-beams in front of the glass facade to visually emphasize the internal load-bearing skeleton. For the Seagram Building, he had the exterior I-beams coated with bronze to match the orange tint he had chosen for the glass facade, thus creating a structure that expressed Seagram’s power—as one of North America’s most successful distilleries—to transform wheat into gold (Figure 3.14). When building his red wooden floor boxes in 1963, Judd took inspiration from the ordinary structures that he understood to emerge from a typically American, function­ alist attitude to building. Watkins Mill was exemplary in this regard. After seeing the Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition, he updated his materials and techniques to create a specifically contemporary American art that more cogently expressed ideals of technological, social, and cultural advancement. It is tempting to see the colors of his first two turnbuckle boxes—one orange, the other turquoise—in analogy to the tinted glass curtain walls of the Seagram Building and Lever House, two of the most highly praised modernist towers in Manhattan’s cityscape.95 Yet the relationship between Judd’s art and the built environment was tenuous and abstract, conceptual rather than—in the traditional meaning of the word—representational, and he freely varied the color of the plexiglass in his subsequent works. Judd was transforming new technological and sci­ entific innovations into art. He used the extraordinary status of art to elevate what was functional and commonplace. He positioned his work within the trajectory of avant­ garde art not only by advancing the formal-aesthetic concerns of modernism but also by employing those visual, material, and structural aspects of the built environment that he thought characteristic of the United States as a modern civilization.

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Figure 3.14 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson (architects) with Severud Associates (structural engineering), Seagram Building, New York City, NY, 1958. Source: Photo: Luay Bahoora/Alamy Stock Photo.

Robert Grosvenor Like Judd, Robert Grosvenor took inspiration from twentieth-century engineering struc­ tures that were part of the everyday built environment. But from the beginning, Gros­ venor was interested in their extraordinary qualities. In November 1965 he exhibited two large pieces at the Park Place Gallery in New York City, an innovative artist-run space that emphasized a spirit of community and pursued interdisciplinary dialogues with sci­ entists, engineers, and architects (Figure 3.15). Topanga, the earlier of the two works, consisted of an upright box that reached a height over nine feet before bending sharply toward the floor at a forty-five-degree angle for almost twenty feet, where it ended, can­ tilevered, just about a foot above the floor. The sculpture’s differently angled planes were yellow and metallic silver (Figure  3.16). At thirty-one feet, Transoxiana, an elongated V-shaped box painted in red and black, was even larger. The sculpture hung from the ceiling, each wing of the V projecting down at a thirty-degree angle, with the apex end­ ing about six inches above the floor. The presentation of these works was a major break­ through for Grosvenor, then in his late twenties, gaining him public recognition.96 David Bourdon, the art critic for the Village Voice, discussed Grosvenor’s work in detail, calling it “astonishing.” Richard Swain, writing for Arts Magazine, concurred, concluding his review of Grosvenor’s pieces with the exclamation, “An impressive feat.”97 A few months after the Park Place show, Transoxiana took center stage at the Pri­ mary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum, where it was installed in the largest room alongside the work of Judd, Robert Morris, and Ronald Bladen. At the same time,

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Figure 3.15 Robert Grosvenor, Transoxiana, 1965. Plywood and paint, 10.5 × 31 × 3 ft. with Topanga in the background, and paintings by Leo Valledor on the walls at Park Place Gallery, 542 West Broadway, November 1965. Source: © Robert Grosvenor © 2023 The Leo Valledor Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo­ graph courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Figure 3.16 Robert Grosvenor, model for Topanga, 1965. Painted wood, ca. 12 in. tall Source: © Robert Grosvenor. Photograph courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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Grosvenor was invited by Virginia Dwan to create pieces for the Los Angeles branch of her gallery.98 One of the works from the Dwan Gallery show, Untitled (yellow), was included in American Sculpture of the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum. Open­ ing in June 1967, the exhibition further cemented the importance of both East and West Coast artists working in the minimalist idiom.99 These new three-dimensional works pro­ duced by American artists also were noted in Europe, with a major group exhibition in 1968 titled Minimal Art at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague that traveled on to Düs­ seldorf and Berlin. The exhibition featured Grosvenor’s newly fabricated work Untitled, Black, nearly forty feet long and seventeen feet tall.100 Despite Grosvenor’s success during the 1960s, his work was long excluded from sub­ sequent narratives of minimalism, and scholarship on his work continues to be want­ ing. Ulrich Loock curated the first Grosvenor retrospective at the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal, in 2005; it traveled to Bern, Switzerland, but had no American venues.101 The exhibition featured photographs of Grosvenor’s large geometric sculptures from the 1960s, since the actual works no longer existed or were in deplorable condition. Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s groundbreaking research on the Park Place Gallery, which re­ sulted in the 2008 exhibition Reimagining Space at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, drew further attention to Grosvenor’s work.102 Both Loock and Henderson understood Grosvenor’s sculptural practice of the 1960s in opposition to the literal, specific object of minimal art. Such a positioning, which is based on a nar­ row definition of minimal art, neglects the fact that Grosvenor was at the forefront of contemporary aesthetic discourses, addressing issues of medium-specificity, opticality, and literalness in his art. A work such as Transoxiana functioned both as painting and sculpture, defying easy categorization. Further, the composition and enormous size of his sculptures provided viewers with lived, spatial, and bodily experiences, which were typical of architectural structures and central to a phenomenological, poststructural in­ terpretation of the minimalist object, which critics such as Rosalind Krauss and others employed to move beyond the limiting trajectory of modernist art. Grosvenor’s objects conveyed the extraordinary possibilities of human ingenuity and innovation. His works, like the structures presented in Twentieth Century Engineering, created a sense of awe and admiration. They instilled a belief in the ability of humans to solve contemporary problems and advance society. Grosvenor and his fellow artists at the Park Place Gallery took a keen interest in scientific and technological discourses as well as the urban environment. In her research on this cohort, Henderson explored “their shared interest in geometry and complex space,” asserting that “theirs was an urban abstraction, filled with dynamism and energy.”103 Grosvenor took inspiration from contemporary civil engineering structures and their social and cultural status as harbingers of progress. Such a utopian attitude corresponded with the Park Place Gallery’s ambition to create an alterna­ tive progressive collaborative. Yet Grosvenor’s practice of the mid-1960s—and minimal art more generally—remained deeply ensconced within a Western, patriarchal concept of pro­ gress, in which technological and scientific advancement benefited the white middle and up­ per classes and largely neglected the voices of women, people of color, and other minorities. Topanga

To make Topanga—by far his largest sculpture to date—Grosvenor first constructed a skeleton frame of two-by-four boards. He then nailed plywood sheets, an eighth of an inch thick, to the internal frame to build the final form. To prevent the sculpture from toppling, Grosvenor secured the base of the frame with lag bolts to the wooden floor­ boards in the Park Place Gallery. Those bolts also served as anchors for tensioned steel

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cables that provided internal stability; the cables ran inside the vertical box from the base of the sculpture to pulleys installed at its apex and then down the diagonal cantilevered limb. Once the construction was in place, Grosvenor painted the surfaces using bright yellow and metallic silver paint.104 Despite such ambitious sculptural forays, Grosvenor—like many of his colleagues who were interested in the new three-dimensional art—did not have the training to work with wood, metal, or other sculptural media. Born in 1937 in New York City, he went to Europe in 1956 to study painting for three years—first at the École des beaux-arts in Dijon and then at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris and the Universitá di Perugia in Italy. During this time Grosvenor painted in an abstract expressionist manner comparable to the style of Willem de Kooning. When he returned to New York in 1960, he shared a studio with Mark di Suvero on Front Street and Fulton, close to the shipyard on the eastern side of Lower Manhattan. He soon began turning his attention toward making three-dimensional works, first working with discarded metal that he crumpled into amorphic forms and later designing geometric, planar forms, which he welded in metal, as in Niaruna (1965, Figure  3.17). He continued developing these ideas in To­ panga and Transoxiana, which he exhibited together with Niaruna in the inaugural show at the new Park Place Gallery.105 In February 1966 the critic Lucy Lippard reviewed Grosvenor’s Park Place show in an article subtitled “Recent Sculpture as Escape.”106 It focused on a number of exhibitions

Figure 3.17 Robert Grosvenor, Niaruna, 1965. Aluminum, paint, and cables; skewed cube: 37 × 88 × 46 1/2 in., green shape in foreground: 85 × 51 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. Installation at Park Place Gallery, 542 West Broadway, November 1965. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculp­ ture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. Source: © Robert Grosvenor. Photograph courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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in New York that featured the work of what she called “escaping painters” or “ex-paint­ ers,” including Judd, Ronald Bladen, and Sol LeWitt.107 Lippard explained that sculpture has provided an escape for those who feel the limitations of painting are too great to be overcome, who share Don Judd’s conviction that “the main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall.” Lippard positioned these artists as surpassing the endpoint of Greenbergian modernism, in which painting was to be reduced to its bare essentials. Judd, Grosvenor, and others pushed the idea of painting beyond flatness and opticality, extending its object quality into three-dimensional space. Topanga is exemplary in this regard: it is a three-dimensional ob­ ject that addresses issues of opticality central to Greenberg’s theory of modernist painting. Lippard also observed that these ex-painters were interested in discourses of engi­ neering. In regard to Grosvenor, she opined that his work “gains from association with modern engineering.”108 Lippard cited the Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition as inspirational for Grosvenor, pointing to the exciting new direction of much contempo­ rary art that incorporated the visual and material aspects of new technological and scien­ tific developments. Her direct reference to Twentieth Century Engineering, on the other hand, can be read as an implicit criticism of copying the shapes of engineering feats. Indeed, Topanga mirrored the composition of the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Designed by Myron Goldsmith of SOM in 1962, the telescope was featured in Twentieth Century Engineering alongside other instruments and towers (Figure 3.18).109 A brief visual comparison shows that Topanga

Figure 3.18 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, designer Myron Goldsmith, McMath-Pierce Solar Tel­ escope, Kitt Peak, Arizona, 1962. Source: Photograph by Ezra Stoller © Ezra Stoller/Esto.

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and the telescope resembled each other in shape, proportion, and the box’s incline. Gros­ venor confirmed that Topanga was inspired by the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, but he clarified that he had not visited the Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition. He was familiar with the Arizona telescope from a journal article.110 McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope

When completed in 1962, the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope was praised as an innova­ tive and highly effective engineering feat, designed in close collaboration with astrono­ mers Robert McMath and Keith Pierce. Civil engineer William Zabriskie, who was first hired to design the telescope, proposed a basic triangular structure with its hypotenuse delineating the direction of the optical tunnel to be aligned with polar north. After Gold­ smith of SOM took over the project, he refined the triangular form, stripping away any unnecessary mass and retaining only the diagonal shaft—which served as the optical tunnel—and a vertical tower needed to support a fifty-ton heliostat at its top.111 Gold­ smith’s design minimized the impact of wind on the structure to keep the telescope as motionless as possible and yield the best scientific results. To this purpose, he separated the reinforced-concrete core of the support tower from its outer skin, a simple steel frame clad with copper panels that acted as a windshield. Goldsmith also rotated the vertical shaft and the diagonal tunnel by forty-five degrees to minimize the surface exposed to direct currents. This intervention reduced the lateral movement of the supporting tower to one 1/1,000th of an inch in twenty-five-mile-per-hour winds.112 In addition, Goldsmith designed the copper skin of the structure as a cooling system with inbuilt ducts arranged in a serpentine pattern. A mixture of water and antifreeze was pumped through the ducts to keep the interior from heating up. Differences in temperature were to be avoided, as they distorted the light beam traveling through the tunnel. Goldsmith also had the exterior skin painted in white titanium dioxide pigment that reflected light, thus further reducing the impact of heat.113 Goldsmith, who had studied at IIT when Mies was the institute’s director and then worked in Mies’s office for seven years before joining SOM, described the structure as “very Miesian, trying to make architecture out of the fact, the plan, the planning limita­ tions, the limitations of normal structures.”114 However, unlike Mies—who took extra effort to make the structure of a building visible, as when adding I-beams to the facade of the Seagram Building to visually reinforce its interior load-bearing steel skeleton—Gold­ smith did not embellish his design for the telescope to visually express the function of the building. Its visual and material forms derived from innovative and economical solu­ tions that responded to practical requirements. Close observation alone did not reveal the internal workings—no load-bearing function or cooling system can be intuited—or conceptual underpinnings that made it a successful structure. Indeed, a large part of the telescope was invisible. As a section drawing of the structure reveals the optical tunnel extended 300 feet underground (Figure 3.19). The heart of the telescope is the under­ ground observation room, where a stereoscope splits the captured light beam into vari­ ous wavelengths, producing a magnified spectrum that is projected onto a surface and transformed into an image. The solar telescope must have been of particular interest to visual artists concerned with the relationship between the optical, visual and the three-dimensional, literal aspects of painting. The telescope was, after all, designed to make visible physical and chemical features of the sun otherwise inaccessible to the human eye. As such, it at once questioned

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Figure 3.19 Section drawing of McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, ca. 1962. Source: © SOM. Photograph courtesy of SOM.

the capacity of the human eye and entertained the possibility of expanding human sight through technological means. Further, the developing field of phenomenology sought to understand the consciousness of seeing—how we interpret what we see within existing frameworks—differentiating it from the ontological nature of seeing. Visual perception did not simply yield an objective view of the world but rather was based on various tech­ nologies, previous experiences, and existing epistemologies. Many artists at the time— including Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Robert Smithson as well as mem­ bers of the Park Place Gallery, including Grosvenor, Peter Forakis, Forrest Myers, and Leo Valledor—were interested in the intersection of visual art and optical science.115 Reyner Banham understood technology to be a central aspect of modern architec­ ture but chided European modernists—including Mies—for expressing technology rather than adopting it as the guiding principle for building. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), he asserted that modern architecture’s claims to functionalism were largely visual conceits “based on easily graspable tropes such as exposed structure and mechanical services,” not technical realities. Utility must remain, Banham maintained, architecture’s primary concern, with symbolic expression arising naturally from func­ tional necessity. In his subsequent books—such as The Architecture of the Well-Tem­ pered Environment (1969) and A Concrete Atlantis (1986)—he softened this stance.116 Analyzing Banham’s last, unpublished manuscript on high-tech architecture, Todd Gan­ non explained that “form and function were not a synthesis waiting to happen, but one of numerous irresolvable antinomies that Banham was more apt to investigate dialecti­ cally than actually resolve,” thus pointing to the “fundamental tension between visual style and functional performance.”117

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Its rationally designed forms, innovative structural solutions, and scientific function made the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope a symbol of progress. During the telescope’s opening ceremony, attending guests were read a letter from President John F. Kennedy, who called the structure a source of pride to the nation. The largest instrument for solar research in the world, it presents American astronomers with a unique tool for investigating the nearest of the stars, our sun. This project is of exceptional interest to all our citizens, for the observatory is financed by the Federal Government through the National Science Foundation.118 Scientific innovation, new technologies and materials, powerful instruments, fresh insights—all were seen as synonymous with social progress, confirming the status of the United States as an advanced civilization. An article in Life magazine titled “Bold Steps to a Glowing Future” doubled down on the president’s assessment: Young people, bold people are casting off the old solutions and the tried and true ways and building new and unorthodox challenges to their world. The sum of their innova­ tions . . . is a world with the barriers down, a world that only the boldest visionary could imagine to create.119 This inspirational language was paired with a panoramic photograph of the solar tel­ escope, the pristine white structure sitting atop a barren mountainous landscape, the expansiveness of the horizon beyond. Expressing an Idea

Topanga was not so much a visual representation of this advanced structure as a trans­ position of ideas into an abstract work of art that employed shapes, colors, composition, and size to convey meaning. While Grosvenor clearly based his sculpture’s geometric forms on the composition of the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, he was little concerned with the functionality of the specific forms and angles. He considered neither the impact of winds nor the thermodynamic efficiency of his material. Instead, Grosvenor made a sculpture out of plywood, painted the surfaces a bright yellow and lustrous silver, and cantilevered the diagonal beam above the ground. Grosvenor did not build Topanga out of metal but rather used aluminum silver paint to suggest the tensile strength of ferroalloys and complemented it with a yellow hue. Many artists associated with minimal art painted their sculptures, whether they were made of plywood or metal. Within a narrow, literalist trajectory of the specific object, however, the application of paint became derided, seen as illusionistic and thus associated with old imitative forms of art. As Grosvenor recounted in 2004, “In the sixties plywood was cheap, easy to work with. I could make mistakes. It wasn’t until later on that the ma­ terial took on an importance of its own.”120 Grosvenor and the artists of the Park Place Gallery frequently used what they called “traffic yellow,” taking inspiration from New York City’s urban environment. Yellow was one of the colors that grabbed for the atten­ tion of motorists, pedestrians, and art audiences alike, be it in the form of street signs, stoplights, or taxis. A poster for a 1964 show at the Park Place Gallery’s first location featured the color, and the new space on 542 West Broadway—inaugurated in late 1965

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with Grosvenor’s work on display—boasted a sign hung above the entrance with black block letters on a yellow background. As Grosvenor stated in a 1969 interview, “When you see a spectrum of color the thing that hits you the hardest is yellow.”121 The application of paint was common in engineering both for practical and aesthetic reasons. As discussed earlier, the copper skin of the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope was covered with a layer of white titanium dioxide paint to reflect sunlight and ensure ther­ modynamic equilibrium. Structural steel, the most common material used in tall and ex­ pansive construction projects during the twentieth century, was also frequently painted, especially when used for bridges. Steel corroded with continuous exposure to moisture and had to be protected with an appropriate primer. Lead tetroxide paint, which had a natural bright red or orange color, was most frequently used as a primer for steel until the mid-1960s. The intense hue of lead tetroxide posed an aesthetic challenge to architects and engineers, who thought it too garish. Given the profession’s aesthetic predilection, designers generally opted to cover the primer with a more moderately colored topcoat. For a short time in 1964, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge assumed a bright red color, standing out from its background and grabbing the attention of New Yorkers, includ­ ing Grosvenor, who recounted that he and di Suvero regularly watched progress on the bridge. It had been painted with a red lead primer but then was covered—functionalism aside—with a battleship-gray topcoat.122 Topanga was striking due to its bright and shimmering colors as well as its enor­ mous size and hovering beam. While small in comparison to structures such as towers, bridges, and dams, Topanga was an enormous work of art by contemporary standards, nearly reaching the ceiling of the Park Place Gallery. Grosvenor was not just interested in monumentality but even more so in creating works that challenged natural laws of gravity. Speaking of the work in 2004, he recalled, “I was taken by the cantilever idea. I just wanted to see what could be done, stretch it.”123 He had played with these ideas in a previous work, Niaruna (Figure 3.17) that consists of two pieces—a skewed cube perched on a sturdy foot and an elongated convex form—connected by tensioned cables. The forms act with and against each other, the cube pulled by the cables, the convex form lifted off the ground ever so slightly. Topanga seems to be in a similar state of precarity and equilibrium. Indeed, when first encountering the work, viewers were prone to assume that both the vertical and diagonal beams were rooted to the ground, corresponding to expectations of structural soundness and the laws of physics. However, when assessing the work more closely, one noticed that the far end of the diagonal beam ended a foot above the floor and that the beam was suspended in the air over a span of twenty feet. Topanga induced a sense of awe that was inherent to many engineering feats in which human ingenuity seemed to defy natural laws of gravity. Grosvenor heightened the expressive character of his work in Transoxiana, which— despite its larger expanse—seemed to defy gravity more easily and elegantly than To­ panga. The V-shaped beam was about six inches narrower than the forms Grosvenor built for Topanga, further emphasizing its elongated composition. Its diagonal lines led the eye upward, conveying a sense of lightness comparable to the cables in a suspension bridge. As with Topanga, first impressions could be deceiving. Upon entering the room, visitors likely assumed that both arms of the sculpture were anchored to the ceiling. Only when inspecting the work more closely did they realize that the work was cantilevered over a distance of thirty-one feet. Henri Dauman’s photograph of Transoxiana pub­ lished in Life adeptly communicated this moment of discovery to the magazine’s readers (Figure 3.20).124 A couple stands beneath the far end of Transoxiana, the man looking

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Figure 3.20 View of Primary Structures, Jewish Museum, NYC, 1966, showing Robert Gros­ venor’s Transoxiana, 1965 (destroyed), and Robert Morris’s Untitled (2 L’s), 1965 (destroyed ca. 1970). Source: Artworks © Robert Grosvenor © 2023 The Estate of Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Henri Dauman © Henri Dauman/Daumanpictures.com.

forward, his partner directing her gaze upward, guiding the readers’ eye toward the ceil­ ing, where Transoxiana is suspended. The presence of the visitors in the photograph also provides a sense of scale, making visceral the enormous size of the work. To achieve this effect, Grosvenor adjusted his construction technique. Unlike Topanga, which had an internal skeleton frame and suspension cables, Transoxiana was built ac­ cording to the principle of stressed-skin construction, also known as monocoque.125 In this technique, internal stress and the stability of the outer skin created extremely light­ weight hollow forms. Invented by airplane builders in the early twentieth century, the technique had been adopted for car bodies and marine vessels by the 1960s. Engineers generally favored metal and plastic for monocoque, but Grosvenor used half-inch ply­ wood for the wing descending from the ceiling and quarter-inch plywood for the ascend­ ing part.126 At the lowest point of the sculpture, where the weight of the beams exerted the greatest pressure, he reinforced the form with an internal steel saddle. To anchor the box to the ceiling, Grosvenor used a steel rod that extended horizontally above the ceil­ ing, counterbalancing the weight of the sculpture.127 The two plywood sculptures Grosvenor exhibited at the Park Place Gallery were not executed to perfection. In her review, Lippard complained about the “poor construction of his work.”128 Trained neither as a sculptor nor an architect nor an engineer, Grosvenor faced technical as well as financial challenges when building these sculptures. Di Suvero,

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who by the mid-1960s was recognized for his large works of wood and metal, provided welcome advice and support with tools. Grosvenor could conceivably have commissioned a commercial shop to fabricate his work, but this would have incurred significant ex­ penses, difficult to justify for an artist at the beginning of his career.129 Increasing the size of his work already came with extra costs, requiring not only more materials and time for fabrication but also more space: before embarking on the construction of Topanga and Transoxiana, Grosvenor moved from his Front Street loft to a larger space on Broome Street. Despite her critique of Grosvenor’s technical proficiency, Lippard eloquently conveyed the meaning of the artist’s sculptures. In her review, she explained that their kind of simplicity is not so much reductive as it is “function,” so far as fine art can be functional. He gains from association with modern engineering what the often poor construction of his work might otherwise sacrifice. But it forces us to think, as he has apparently thought, about the esthetic ramifications of immensity, weight and tension in space.130 Bourdon aptly titled a survey article of Grosvenor’s work “The Cantilevered Rainbow,” and Martin Friedman, who curated the 1969 exhibition 14 Sculptors: The Industrial Edge at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, used the term “engineered romanticism” for the artist’s work. Friedman compared the effect of some of Grosvenor’s sculptures to the type of “excitement belonging to natural phenomena such as a gigantic wave poised before it makes its fall, or man-made phenomena such as the high bridge spanning two distant points.”131 In early 1966 gallerist Virginia Dwan provided support that allowed Grosvenor to im­ prove his building techniques and execute his designs to precision, so that his sculptures visually and materially more forcefully expressed ideals of technological and structural advancement. Dwan, who opened her gallery in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1959, established a second branch in New York in 1965. That year, she also became a supporter of the Park Place Gallery, participating in a patron-artist model quite different from established commercial galleries. Dwan, along with four wealthy collectors, paid an annual contribution to provide the artists with a secure income and cover the gallery’s operating expenses in exchange for works of art. Dwan implemented a similar model for her Los Angeles gallery. She paid promising artists a stipend and invited them to stay at her guest house while working in a studio she owned in nearby Venice. Grosvenor stayed with Dwan in Los Angeles for five months in 1966, building two large works, Untitled (yellow) and Tenerife, which debuted at his solo exhibition that opened in her gallery in June. This arrangement well suited Grosvenor, helping him to prefinance the enormous works he was intent on building.132 Untitled (yellow) was the more monumental of the two works (Figure 3.21). It con­ sisted of a twenty-four-foot-long diagonal yellow beam. The lower part of the sculpture floated about four feet above the ground, rising at a forty-five-degree angle up to the ceiling. At either end of the beam, Grosvenor added horizontal capstones a foot deep and eight feet in diameter, which provided a kind of frame that contained the overall diagonal thrust of the work. In the second piece, Tenerife, a metallic purple beam jutted from the ceiling at a forty-degree angle; after about six feet, the beam, measuring one foot across, ran horizontal to the gallery floor and tapered to a triangular tip. Grosvenor designed both works for the specific height of Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery and opted for

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Figure 3.21 Robert Grosvenor, Untitled (yellow), 1966. Plywood, fiberglass, steel, and acrylic lac­ quer, 13 × 8 × 24 ft. In the background, on the right wall: Robert Grosvenor, Model for a Large Ceiling Piece, 1966. Painted aluminum, plywood, 11 × 45 × 45 in. Instal­ lation at Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1966. Source: © Robert Grosvenor. Photograph courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

a significant gap between the sculptures and the floor, thus drawing immediate attention to their hovering, suspended presence. These sculptures were constructed from plywood around an elaborate internal skel­ eton (Figure 3.22). Grosvenor covered the plywood sheets with fiberglass cloth and ap­ plied a layer of resin, creating an even surface ready for spray painting. After transporting the works from the studio to the Dwan Gallery, Grosvenor bolted the sculptures to the ceiling and applied the final touches. His improved construction techniques allowed him to convincingly express the idea of well-engineered objects that effortlessly defy the natural laws of gravity. The sculptures’ smooth, shiny, expert finish corresponded with the finish fetish work associated with artists working in Los Angeles at that time, also referred to as West Coast minimalism. William Wilson, reviewing Grosvenor’s show at the Dwan Gallery for the Los Angeles Times, described the pieces as “sleek and knifelike,” comparing them to airplane wings and declaring that they “create an exhilarating sensation of flight.”133 Maurice Tuchman, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), selected Untitled (yellow) for inclusion in the 1967 exhibition Ameri­ can Sculpture of the Sixties, which traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Alas, the work was destroyed afterward because Grosvenor could not afford to store it. Tenerife was purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its permanent collection in 1967, and it has survived as one of Grosvenor’s few large sculptures from this period.

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Figure 3.22 Advertisement in Artforum for Robert Grosvenor exhibition at Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, June  7 to July  2, 1966, depicting Untitled (yellow) under construction in Dwan’s studio space. Source: © Robert Grosvenor. Photograph courtesy Dwan Archives.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles sought to include the work in its 2004 exhibition A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–1968, which provided a long-overdue reexamination of minimal art, only to discover the work’s condition was too poor to be included.134 The Whitney then initiated a restoration of the sculpture, with museum cura­ tors and conservators working closely with Grosvenor. Tenerife was finally exhibited as part of the Whitney’s collection display Singular Visions in 2010 and remained on view for two years, hovering effortlessly in the air. Phenomenology of Space

Grosvenor’s large sculptures provided audiences with a lived aesthetic experience in which the forms of a structure were contingent and subjective. When looking at Ten­ erife from the side, visitors see an angled beam, but as one walks around the sculpture, its shape changes dramatically (Figure 3.24). The angle between the diagonal and the horizontal beams decreases to the point where it is non-existent. From a foreshortened perspective, one perceives the sculpture as a continuous diagonal box. The extent of these changes and distortions depends on the visitor’s position vis-à-vis the sculpture, as well as on the object’s size and its complexity of form. A six-foot-tall cube produces fewer distortions than a 600-foot-tall structure when seen from the same distance; and in comparison to a cube of the same size, an object such as Tenerife creates stronger distor­ tions due to its multifaceted composition. The somatic experience integral to Grosvenor’s large sculptures was foundational for the phenomenological readings of minimal art that questioned, critiqued, and undermined dominant modernist discourses. The singular,

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Figure 3.23 Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 84), 1965. Nitrocellulose lacquer on aluminum, 8¼ × 253 × 8¼ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc. Source: © 2023 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY.

autonomous work of art was decentered by a relational framework that played out be­ tween objects, viewers, and surrounding space. Rosalind Krauss introduced a phenomenological reading of minimalist sculptures in her article “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” a review of the artist’s solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966.135 Seeing untitled (DSS 84; Figure  3.23) for the first time, Krauss had assumed that the individual members painted in purple lacquer were suspended from the continuous aluminum bar. But viewing the work from the side, she realized that the purple members were actually L-shaped boxes mounted to the wall, thus serving as the load-bearing structures for the aluminum bar. Krauss wrote that the purple boxes, when seen from the side, were “reminiscent of the colonnades of classical architecture or of the occurrence at equal intervals of the vertical supporting members of any modular structure.”136 Upon further scrutiny, it became clear that the boxes, each a different length, were spaced unequally following an inverse system that upended the perspectival logic of diminution. This led Krauss to declare that the work “cannot be seen rationally, in terms of a given sense of geometrical laws or theorems evolved prior to the experience of the object. Instead, the sculpture can be sensed only in terms of its present coming into being.”137 She coined the expression “lived illusion” to describe her experi­ ence and concluded her article by observing that artists such as Judd had arrived at formats which involve the viewer in an experience which is on the one hand more illusive than that of either a normal easel painting or an easily cohesive sculp­ tural form, and on the other more immediate than both.138 In her analysis, Krauss drew on French phenomenology, in particular the theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.139 Rooted in architectural observations, Merleau-Ponty’s phe­ nomenology became a fitting methodology for interpreting minimalist sculptures. Krauss

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herself was well versed in architectural discourses, having studied at Wellesley College with John McAndrew, who previously worked as curator of architecture at MoMA. (Her husband at the time, Richard Krauss, was also an architect.) Krauss was thus familiar with discussions of space, parallax, and illusion in architecture, addressed most famously in Colin Rowe’s contemporary writings on Le Corbusier.140 In addition, Annette Michel­ son, who had lived in France for fifteen years and was personally acquainted with many French intellectuals, played a key role in popularizing French phenomenology as an in­ terpretive model for the new American sculpture. Michelson moved to New York, be­ came a contributing editor for Artforum in 1966, and developed a close friendship with Krauss.141 In her book Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), Krauss further explored the idea of time and space in relation to modernist sculpture and two years later published the essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” to discuss the recent development of sculp­ tural practices that could easily be mistaken for architecture or landscape design. During the mid-1960s, Krauss’s term “lived illusion” provided a sophisticated riposte to the perceptual illusion developed in op art, which was showcased to great popular success in the 1965 MoMA exhibition The Responsive Eye.142 In her review of the exhi­ bition, Krauss accused op artists of creating the “illusion of a tactile object” and playing with “illusionistic projection.”143 Illusion was associated with traditional, representa­ tional modes of painting, in which the canvas functioned as a window onto the world, denying its own material reality. Following a Greenbergian, formalist, medium-specific trajectory of modern art, in which painting had shed its representational function and was to articulate its own medium-specific characteristics, Krauss, along with many other avant-garde critics, dismissed the work of op artists. In recent accounts, art historians such as Richard Shiff and Linda Dalrymple Henderson distinguish between illusion and illusionism, whereby the former—more precisely defined as perceptual illusion—is un­ derstood as “real” in that it addresses the actual experience of looking.144 They thus reframe accounts that derisively equated op art with illusionism and reposition the move­ ment as an avant-garde endeavor that challenged conventions of seeing. Krauss’s concept of lived illusion is especially apt when considering Grosvenor’s sculp­ tures. Being significantly larger than Judd’s specific objects and more complex in their forms, works such as Topanga and Transoxiana were continuously coming into being, questioning ossified categories of medium and form. Visitors first encountering Gros­ venor’s works at the Park Place Gallery were likely perplexed about their spatial make­ up and the relationships between the variously angled surfaces (Figure 3.15). In the case of Transoxiana, it seemed as if the beam grew flatter toward its lower edge and then regained volume in its upper sections. Was this a sculpture or a painting? What was the actual shape of the beam; did its size and volume change across the length of the work? Only by walking around the work and seeing it from different points of view did one grasp the shape of the beam and the composition of the sculpture: the beam had a square cross-section whose sides were slanted at a forty-five-degree angle when seen in relation to the perpendicular walls of the gallery space. The perception of Transoxiana also depended on the distance afforded between viewer and sculpture within the exhibition space. At the Park Place Gallery, the relatively small room kept visitors at a close distance so that the three-dimensional aspects of Tran­ soxiana dominated. When installed five months later at the Jewish Museum as part of the Primary Structures exhibition, Transoxiana appeared—at least initially—as an elon­ gated, two-dimensional V. Entering the gallery from either of the two doors located on the long wall opposite Transoxiana, the work presented itself in its full length. From

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this standpoint, at a distance of about thirty feet, the work appeared with a minimum of spatial depth (Figure 3.20). In addition, the height of the different spaces played into visi­ tors’ perceptions. Since Transoxiana extended from the ceiling, the relationship between sculpture and viewer changed with the height of the room. In Primary Structures, the gap between floor and sculpture increased to four feet, making Transoxiana—from the per­ spective of the visitor—seem taller than it had at Park Place and lifting it more forcefully into the visual realm of painting.145 Transoxiana at once referenced sculptural precedents and the tradition of painting. Its dominant V-shape was a motif not uncommon in paintings of the early 1960s. Kenneth Noland painted variations of colored V-shaped bands on bare rectangular canvases, as in the twelve-foot-long Morning Span (1964).146 Noland’s large canvases acknowledged the flatness of the support, and thus the material quality of painting, yet at the same time transcended painting’s objectness by conveying the immaterial, optical quality of color.147 The following year, Frank Stella began working on his notched V-series in which he shaped canvases according to the painted forms, as in Slieve Roe (1964). As in his earlier work, Stella was interested in conveying the surface quality of the painted shapes while drawing attention to the painting itself as an object that not only had width and length but also depth.148 Stella’s work was crucial for Judd and the development of the specific, literal object, but a rift between their practices and ideas developed as Stella returned to illusion. “To many observers,” as Matthew Levy eloquently states, “the irregular poly­ gons signaled Stella’s disavowal of the sculptors’ aesthetic materialism in favor of mod­ ernist opticality.”149 Grosvenor’s sculptures evocatively united these concerns with ease and sophistication. In Topanga and Transoxiana, he played with the continuous transformation between flat surface and three-dimensional space, but he had used separate colors to indicate the differently angled planes of the beams. In subsequent works made for the Dwan Gal­ lery show in Los Angeles, Grosvenor painted the sculptures monochromatically—bright metallic yellow in Untitled (yellow), a glittery purple that refracted and reflected light in Tenerife—to heighten their spatial indeterminacy. In addition, he designed the beams with a rhomboid rather than a square cross-section, which further complicated the sculp­ ture’s shape and composition. The works became, to use Krauss’s term, “an irritant,” as visitors approaching the sculptures were continuously challenged to interrogate and adjust their preconceived conceptions.150 Untitled (yellow) and Tenerife kept oscillating between flatness and sculptural form and remained exhilaratingly indeterminate. William Wilson explained in his 1966 review, “The yellow piece has an unnerving property of sometimes looking like a flat thing illusionistically painted.” Considering the installation as a whole, he summarized his experience: “Working together the pieces set the gallery space in motion, warping and slicing it until the rectangular room is transformed into an arena of moving space.”151 Not only the sculptures but the room and the viewers were implicated in the aesthetic experience of art. Robert Morris was another key player who theorized how we perceive, experience, and interpret objects. His 1966 essay “Notes on Sculpture” has become an important source in the canonization of minimal art. It explored the intricate relationship between gestalt and phenomenology, which is key to the translation or transposition that oc­ curred between two-dimensional images and lived experiences as they played out in Grosvenor’s work and which has remained important in the reception of minimal and postminimal art. As Anna Chave and others have shown, Morris’s minimalist practice emerged from his involvement with dance and performance art and he took inspiration

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from dancers—in particular Yvonne Rainer—who considered how we experience ob­ jects, spaces, and the built environment in time.152 In “Notes on Sculpture,” Morris elaborated on the importance of perceptual theories, including gestalt psychology, in relation to contemporary sculptural practices.153 During the early twentieth century, gestalt theorists studied how the human eye-brain apparatus processed the real to create images.154 Morris emphasized his interest in the gestalt of a sculpture that visually imprinted itself on the viewer’s mind. His early minimalist work, such as the two L-beams that he exhibited in Primary Structures, exemplified Morris’s interest in simple geometric forms that created a gestalt (Figure  3.20). He went on to explore the relationship between viewer and sculpture in space, and thus the changing perception of objects in time. Scholars have interpreted Morris’s “cloud” installation at the Green Gallery in December 1964 with recourse to French phenomenology, emphasiz­ ing how the changing position of the viewer within the ensemble changed the shapes of the exhibited works. Yet analysis of the environmental character of the installation has largely been based on a photograph of the installation taken from a low vantage point. The sculptures thus seem larger and the shapes more distorted than they would have ap­ peared to visitors in the actual space.155 Grosvenor’s sculptures—larger and more complex than either Morris’s or Judd’s work of the time—produced a lived aesthetic experience that was difficult to capture in pho­ tographic reproductions. Indeed, photographs that show his work from foreshortened angles create jarring compositions that throw into disarray any sense of compositional balance that comes into being between the work’s perceived gestalt and the experience in time and space (Figure 3.24). Photographs could be no more than fixed, miniaturized, two-dimensional versions of artworks, but they played an important role in establishing the reputation of an artist. They could be easily reproduced in journals, weeklies, and newspapers, which reached a much larger audience than locally and temporally circum­ scribed exhibitions. Journals, such as Arts Magazine, Artforum, and Art International also played a key role in establishing the polemics around the new three-dimensional art. The unreadability—even awkwardness—of Grosvenor’s sculptures in two dimensions surely hampered their theoretical reception. David Bourdon, in a 1966 article in which he provided an overview of the Park Place artists, circumvented this challenge. He reproduced a photograph of a scale model of Topanga (Figure 3.16).156 Grosvenor carved the model from two pieces of balsa wood, which he then glued together and painted.157 Barely twelve inches tall, this maquette was much better suited to communicate the overall shape or gestalt of the sculpture when photographed. Offering a straight-on side view of the model, the photograph avoided any perspectival distortions. It also recorded stronger shadows, allowing viewers to infer the angles of the sculpture’s tilted planes, especially where vertical and diagonal beams met. The photograph of the model self-consciously addressed the mediations, continui­ ties, and discrepancies between large sculptural object and two-dimensional representa­ tion, between the idea and the reality of a sculpture.158 In Bourdon’s article, the caption for the photograph specified the title and the date for Topanga but not the size or the medium of the work, thus leading to easy confu­ sion between the model and its full-scale counterpart. In subsequent publications, the photograph of the model was captioned with the dimensions of the actual work, and the medium was specified as painted aluminum.159 The effortless, dematerialized transposi­ tion between sculptures, models, drawings, photographs, and verbal descriptions became defining for postminimalist art practices, in particular conceptual art. Indeed, even Judd

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Figure 3.24 Robert Grosvenor, Tenerife, 1966. Plywood, fiberglass, steel, and acrylic lacquer, 63 1/4 × 276 1/2 × 45 1/8 in. Installed in the exhibition Singular Vision at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010. Source: © Robert Grosvenor. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Re­ source, NY.

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made use of such transmedia conditions. Most conspicuously, the captions for many of his drawings as reproduced in the catalog accompanying the artist’s first major museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968 specified the medium as galvanized iron, followed by measurements in three dimensions. Such material indiffer­ ence all but negated the literalist, minimalist mantra, “What you see is what you see.”160 Primary Structures

The three-dimensional works showcased in the Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1966, including the sculptures by Grosvenor and Judd, no longer conformed to the idea of medium specificity that had been a crucial criterion in the devel­ opment of modern art. During the mid-1960s the blurring boundaries between painting and sculpture in contemporary art were a frequently discussed topic. As Judd himself astutely observed in 1965, “Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture.”161 In his earlier “Kansas City Report” and his review of Twentieth Century Engineering, he had also addressed the soluble boundaries between art, architecture, and engineering. By crossing these disciplinary boundaries, art­ ists sought to relate their aesthetic practices more forcefully to the discourses and spaces that shaped people’s everyday lives. Reviews of Primary Structures positioned the exhibition as defining the visual arts of the period. The sheer amount of coverage in art journals and the popular press spoke of its importance. The New York Times devoted four articles to the exhibition: Grace Glueck called it “This Year’s Landmark Show.”162 And Hilton Kramer, while critical of most of the individual works, admitted that the exhibition as a whole provided the “first comprehensive glimpse of a style that promises—or perhaps one should say threatens—to become our period style.”163 In a subsequent article, Kramer asserted that it was “one of those exhibitions that defines a period and fixes it irrevocably in one’s consciousness.”164 Many reviewers discussed the artworks in Primary Structures in the context of engi­ neering, science, and technology. Time magazine titled its article “Sculpture: Engineer’s Esthetic” and pointed out that a number of the featured artists had studied engineering, while others, echoing the practice of industrial designers, had their ideas executed in machine shops.165 The author of “The New Druids” in Newsweek emphasized the art’s relationship to new technologies, describing the exhibited works as sample swatches of our post-industrial, technologized civilization. There are shapes and materials from contemporary architecture, engineering, physics, mathematics, philosophy—but most of all there is the shape, clear and clean, with a faint fluorescent flow, of the minds of these new druids in their cybernetic Stonehenge.166 These critics hailed the new three-dimensional art as “landmarks” and “monuments,” mirroring the language that was used in reviews of Twentieth Century Engineering two years earlier. Both exhibitions were thought to be defining of the period. Architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote two extensive reviews of the MoMA engineering exhi­ bition for The New York Times, praising both the significance of the show as well as the presented works. Her first article announced “one of the most spectacular and signifi­ cant shows in [the museum’s] 35-year history.”167 In the following article, she confirmed the importance of what she called a “landmark exhibition” that both makes and re­ cords history. Huxtable explained that “the museum makes it clear once and for all that

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20th-century engineering is producing 20th-century monuments of lasting significance, and that the art of construction is the greatest art of our time.”168 These were impressive structures not only because they used the newest technologies and materials, but also because they embodied progress. In Primary Structures, the association with monuments was particularly triggered by the sculptures exhibited in the museum’s largest room, which featured works by Gros­ venor and Judd alongside Bladen and Morris. These works were not only character­ ized by simple, geometric forms and cool, anonymous looks, which viewers associated with new industrial materials and machine-produced objects, but also by their large size. Bladen’s piece, Three Elements, consisted of three ten-foot-tall slabs leaning at a slight angle and installed in a row stretching over a distance of twenty-eight feet; they were made of wood and aluminum and painted black. Morris showed the two identical yet dif­ ferently placed L-shaped beams (mentioned earlier), each measuring eight by eight feet, constructed of wood and painted white. In this gallery, curator Kynaston McShine had grouped together the most impressive, monumental works, and they dominated discus­ sions of the exhibition.169 McShine developed the idea of Primary Structures while he was working as a cura­ tor at MoMA. In interviews conducted by James Meyer, McShine recounted that the exhibition developed in conversation with Lippard in early 1965.170 Lippard was work­ ing part-time at the MoMA library while getting her degree in art history from New York University. She also wrote the “New York Letter” for Art International, where she would mention the 1964 MoMA engineering exhibition—as cited at the beginning of the chapter—in her review of Grosvenor’s work.171 Lippard played an important role in the development of Primary Structures but—be it due to her gender, position, or age—did not receive any public credit when the show opened at the Jewish Museum in April 1966 (McShine was offered a curatorial position there and took the exhibition with him). The following year, though, Lippard contributed an essay to the catalog accompany­ ing LACMA’s American Sculpture of the Sixties exhibition, where she defined “primary structure” as “a non-sculptural sculpture, that is, a sculpture which rejects the history of sculpture as precedent in favor of the history of painting, and at times, of architecture and engineering.”172 Artists, curators, and critics were keen to move beyond the selfreferential, medium-specific trajectory of modern art by thinking their aesthetic practice in relationship not simply to painting but to architecture, engineering, and public space. Artists sought collaborations with engineers, technicians, and institutions that were at the forefront of new developments and thus could facilitate the production of more ambi­ tious, technologically innovative, and large-scale environmental works. Such collabora­ tions, however, also more directly challenged artists to critically consider the complicity of technological and industrial advancement with systems of power that perpetuated inequalities of race, class, gender, or cultural identity.173 Grosvenor continued to develop his practice. Having transitioned from painting to large, three-dimensional objects, he was keen to move beyond the secluded white cube of the gallery. When invited to exhibit at the Loeb Student Center at New York Univer­ sity in early 1967, he designed a pair of angled beams that seemed to pierce through the roof of the building.174 Inside the gallery, visitors only saw part of the sculpture: two cantilevered beams that jutted diagonally across the space over a distance of twenty-five feet. A more comprehensive view of the work was offered from across the street. From there the interior beams—visible through the gallery’s large windows—seemed to cut through the ceiling and continued outside where two vertical pillars of twenty and thirty

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feet, respectively, were installed. The separate parts of the two angled beams were seen as a visual continuum that penetrated the building. From this perspective, the artwork had to compete with the existing forms and scale of the cityscape, where it was easily absorbed by and confused with the mullions, pillars, and towers that characterized mod­ ernist architecture.175 Around the same time, Grosvenor’s Model for a Large Ceiling Piece (1966) was featured in the exhibition Art for the City at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Figure 3.21, in the background).176 Samuel Green, the director of the institute, invited the artists of the Park Place Gallery to show­ case sculptures, models, and two-dimensional works that in the future could be realized outdoors or full-scale. Green also secured the work of eight additional artists, who had created monumental sculptural works to be exhibited in public, outdoor spaces through­ out the city. Examples included four geometric steel pieces by Tony Smith installed on the plaza of the Municipal Services Building, and Edward Higgins’ Temple of the Mira, a steel-and-epoxy construction positioned outside the Society Hill Towers. The exhibition was to challenge current predilections for public art in Philadelphia, which was one of the first American cities that adopted a Percent for Art ordinance. Ratified in 1959, the law in Philadelphia required that one percent of the total construction cost of each public build­ ing be used for art. Architects, city administrators, and curators tended towards works that humanized the stripped-down, cold, and geometric language of modernist buildings, frequently commissioning artists such as Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, and Alexander Calder, who were known for their organic, abstracted, and at times playful and colorful sculptural works. Green opined that public art was not simply to serve beautification ef­ forts but should showcase the latest avant-garde endeavors. In a conversation with Grace Glueck, he explained, “I want to show them there are other things beyond the safe old Henry Moores, Alexander Calders and Leonard Baskins that most cities buy.”177 A few months later, Green was hired to organize the exhibition Sculpture in Environ­ ment in New York City. Initiated by the city’s Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, the exhibition was to bring contemporary works of art to the public by featuring them within the urban setting.178 Green commissioned twenty-four artists to create works for specific locations throughout the city. Claes Oldenburg was among those artists and took the opportunity to realize Placid Civic Monument, indeed turning on its head what Irving Sandler described in the exhibitions catalog as a turn towards the monumental. In either case, the exhibition provided much sought-after financial and institutional sup­ port for contemporary artists interested in moving beyond the museum and the gallery to work outdoors in public spaces and to employ the newest material innovations and techniques, from stainless steel and aluminum to epoxy, plexiglass, and laser lights. One of the most ambitious projects that aimed to facilitate collaborations between art­ ists and industrial companies was initiated by Tuchman at the LACMA. He started the Art and Technology Program in 1967, inviting more than sixty American artists to realize their ideas on a grand scale with access to the newest advancements in fields such as ma­ terial science and structural engineering. Artists such as di Suvero, Judd, and Oldenburg were excited by the possibilities.179 The enthusiasm with which many artists had greeted Tuchman’s Art and Technology Program, however, ebbed over the ensuing years. With the escalation of US military involvement in Southeast Asia, technological progress be­ came synonymous with the decline of civilization rather than its advance.180 Many artists feared that they unwittingly were becoming complicit with the military-industrial com­ plex, contributing their creative ideas to companies that disregarded human lives. Of the

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Figure 3.25 Robert Grosvenor, Untitled, 1972. Wood and creosote, 5 × 300 × 9 in. Crosby Street at the corner of Broome Street, New York, 1972. Source: © Robert Grosvenor. Photograph courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

seventy-six artists listed on a roster of participants in 1967, twenty-three began collabo­ rating with industry partners; by the time the program was presented to the public in early 1971, only sixteen projects had come to fruition. In a 1999 interview, Tuchman explained that the project was “undermined by the Vietnam War almost month to month.”181 New technologies employed by architects, civil engineers, and urban planners to mod­ ernize American cities similarly fell into disrepute. The promises of ambitious urban renewal projects, including new expressways, bridges, tunnels, and modernist towers, did not live up to expectations. MoMA’s Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition had hailed the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles as a harbinger of progress, as it boasted a fourmile section with four lanes in each direction that carried a then-astounding 190,000 vehicles per day.182 The freeway provided some Angelenos an efficient means to travel around the city, but it also ruined lives. Residents from predominantly poorer, segregated neighborhoods were evicted, and their homes were razed; the project brought an increase of noise and pollution and a devaluation of property. In New York City, the initiatives of master builder Robert Moses, including the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and the pro­ posed Lower Manhattan Expressway, similarly sparked excitement but also caused hard­ ship, devastation, and resistance. Judd continued working in the minimalist vein but increasingly separated his formalaesthetic choices from notions of technological innovation and social progress. Advanc­ ing a more equitable and just world could no longer be tied to a rational, functionalist approach that ignored the well-being of so many Americans. Disillusioned by prevalent

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notions of progress as well as the institutional framework of avant-garde art, he left New York City to settle in Marfa, Texas, where he could more easily imagine a better world, even if it remained an ideal. Grosvenor, by contrast, adjusted his formal-aesthetic language as mainstream notions of American progress were critiqued for privileging a masculinist, white, technocratic point of view. Most evocatively, he created a series of Untitled works in the early 1970s using industrially fabricated wooden beams that he then fractured. One example featured a thirty-foot-long plank that the artist cracked in three places, wood fibers still connected, resulting in an undulating zigzag line. Grosvenor photographed the work after placing it in the gutter on Crosby Street in Manhattan (Fig­ ure 3.25). Another example, realized in a field in Fresno, California, in 1972, consisted of two telephone poles planted two feet deep in the ground at a distance of twenty feet. Grosvenor then had the parts above ground pulled in opposite directions, causing them to break at ground level and create what he called “a broken line.”183 Grosvenor’s beams and his use of force and counterforce no longer conveyed ideals of advancement. His work no longer defied the laws of gravity; rather, it conveyed—viscerally, materially, and conceptually—the disintegration and destruction that were part and parcel of modern American progress. Notes 1. Twentieth Century Engineering was on view from June  30–September  13, 1964. See exhi­ bition catalog Twentieth Century Engineering (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), and “Twentieth Century Engineering,” press release no. 32, Tuesday, June 30, 1964, Museum Archives, Museum of Modern Art, New York (hereafter MoMA Archives). At the time, the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope was known as the McMath Solar Telescope. 2. Donald Judd, “Month in Review,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 1 (October 1964): 62; reprinted in Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975, ed. Kasper Koenig (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and New York: New York University Press, 1975), 137. 3. Lucy Lippard, “New York Letter: Recent Sculpture as Escape,” Art International 10, no. 2 (February 1966): 49. 4. James Meyer, ed., Minimalism (London: Phaidon Press, 2010); James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Ann Goldstein, ed., A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–1968 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Gregor Stemmrich, ed., Minimal Art: Eine Kritische Retrospektive (Dresden: Verlage der Kunst, 1995); and Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968). 5. The DSS numbers were designated in Brydon Smith, ed., Donald Judd: Catalogue raisonné of Paintings, Objects and Wood Blocks, 1960–1974 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1975). The DDS acronym derives from the initials of Budley Del Balso, Roberta Smith, and Brydon Smith, the compilers of the catalogue raisonné. For DSS 58, see Smith, Judd, 324. The Judd Foundation specifies that “untitled” be unitalicized and lowercase when referring to Judd’s work. Email correspondence with Judd Foundation, May 3, 2023. 6. The invoice for the steel plates is dated March 8, 1965; the purchase date for the red plexiglass is not given. A second example of the red plexiglass box was made in early 1968. Bernstein Broth­ ers moved to Long Island in early 1964; see Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Postmodern City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 171. 7. See services advertised on their invoice, reproduced in Jeffrey Kopie, “Chronology,” in Donald Judd, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate, 2004), 251. On Bernstein Brothers, their business, and working relationship with Judd, see Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects, 167–173; Smith, Judd: Catalogue raisonné, 24, 92, 118; and Annie Ochmanek, “Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties, Inc.,” in Judd, ed. Ann Temkin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2020), 150–169.

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8. A number of invoices from Allied Plastics from late 1964 are in the Judd Foundation Archive, New York and Marfa. See also Tamar Margalit, “Around the Studio: In Conversation with Dudley Del Balso, Jamie Dearing, and Ellie Meyer,” in Judd, ed. Temkin, 286–293; Smith, Judd: Catalogue raisonné, 120, 121; Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd,” in 7 Sculptors (Phila­ delphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1965), 13; reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 4. 9. On the individual craftsmanship of Judd’s work, see Josiah McElheny, “Invisible Hand,” Artforum International 42, no. 10 (Summer 2004): 209–210; and Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects, 167. 10. Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects, 149–186. 11. David Raskin, Donald Judd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); David Raskin, “Judd’s Moral Art,” in Judd, ed. Serota, 78–95; and David Raskin, “Specific Oppositions: Judd’s Art and Politics,” Art History 24, no. 5 (November 2001), 682–706. 12. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74–82; reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, 181–189. 13. Donald Judd, “Kansas City Report,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 3 (December 1963): 24–28; re­ printed in Judd, Complete Writings, 181–189. 14. Judd, Complete Writings, vii. 15. Judd’s place of birth provided by Ellie Meyer, conversation with the author, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas, June 15, 2016. 16. Kopie, “Chronology,” in Donald Judd, ed. Serota, 246; and Roberta Smith, “Donald Judd,” in Judd: Catalogue raisonné, 3–4. Thomas Kellein is the only scholar known to me who has devoted any attention to “Kansas City Report,” calling it a “home fixture.” See Thomas Kel­ lein, “The Whole Space: The Early Work of Donald Judd,” in Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955–1968 (Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld and Menil Foundation, 2002), 20. 17. Donald Judd to Julie Finch, August 26, 1963, Julie Finch private collection. Thanks to Julie Finch for allowing access to the postcard. The manuscript for “Kansas City Report” includes an insert on the Watkins Mill written in different ink, which indicates that the report was writ­ ten in stages. Judd Foundation Archive, Marfa, Texas. 18. Smith, “Donald Judd,” and Maija Vilcins, Monique Baker, and Brydon Smith, “List of Exhibi­ tions,” in Donald Judd: Catalogue raisonné, 107–112, 282–83. 19. Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74–82 and Judd, “Kansas City Report,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 3 (December 1963): 24–28; both reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, 181–89, 103–105. 20. The Nelson-Atkins Museum was completed in 1933. On the architecture, see Michael Church­ man and Scott Erbes, High Ideals and Aspirations: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 1933– 1993 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 17–21. 21. Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 25. The Joslyn Art Museum was designed in the Art Deco style that incorporated classical elements. 22. Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 26. Note that Judd’s “Kansas City Report” does not include il­ lustrations of any of the buildings he discussed. 23. “Last Chance to Save Watkins Mill,” Kansas City Star, March 12, 1963, 36; “Watkins Mill Bonds Passed,” Kansas City Star, March  20, 1963; “From an Old Mill, A  Fine Park Will Grow,” Kansas City Star, March 21, 1963, 32; and Louis W. Potts and Ann M. Sligar, Wat­ kins Mill: The Factory on the Farm (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2004), 182–185. 24. MG references the British automobile brand. 25. Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 26. See also Potts and Sligar, Watkins Mill, 94. 26. Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 26. 27. Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 26. 28. Donald Judd Library Inventory, Judd Foundation Archive; and Le Corbusier, Vers une Archi­ tecture, rev. ed. (Paris: Vincent, Fréal, 1958). 29. Walter Gropius, “Die Entwicklung moderner Industriebaukunst,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1913), 17–22; Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: G. Crès, 1923); and Jean-Louis Cohen, introduction to Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 1–78.

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30. See Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” (1908) reprinted in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, trans. Michael Bullock, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 19–24; for the meanings of “modern” as socially progressive, see Rosemarie Haag Bletter, introduction to Adolf Behne, The Modern Functional Building (1926), trans. Michael F. Robinson (Santa Monica: Getty Research Institute, 1996). 31. Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: US Industrial Building and European Modern Architec­ ture, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 1–21, and 7. See also Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: The Architectural Press, 1960), 9–12, 201–330; and Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). For the reciprocal exchange between the United States and Europe in the development of modern architecture and progressive politics, see, respectively, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “From Isolationism to Internationalism: American Acceptance of the Bau­ haus,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. James-Chakraborty (Minneapo­ lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 153–70; and Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 32. Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 26. 33. Donald Judd, interview by Bruce Hooton for the Archives of American Art, February 3, 1965, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (hereafter AAA). 34. Potts and Sligar, Watkins Mill, 87–111. Judd mentioned that Watkins Mill was constructed with the help of slave labor but did not draw any consequences from such knowledge and how it would alter the meanings of the building’s visual and material form; see Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 26. 35. Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 10 (September  1964), reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, 132. 36. Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 25. Judd recounted his dismay with the collection of the NelsonAtkins Museum in Barbara Rose, interview with Don Judd [1972], transcript, Barbara Rose Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, roll 2, 1–2. Kellein interprets these words in their positive connotations, as expressing Judd’s enthusiastic approval of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, not recognizing their double meaning. Kellein, “The Whole Space,” 20. 37. Ralph T. Coe, introduction to Popular Art: Artistic Projections of Common American Symbols (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum, 1963), 4–24. 38. Judd, interview by Hooton, 1965. Hooton compared Hopper’s work to literary work of the same period and understood them both in terms of describing America. 39. Nathan Gluck quoted in “Nathan Gluck: The Transition from Commercial Art to Pop Art,” in John O’Connor and Benjamin Liu, Unseen Warhol (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), 35; Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol: A  Biography (New York: Open Road Media, 2001), 52; and “Gallery Shows, Museum Exhibits,” The New York Times, April 19, 1964, X22. 40. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966,” in Andy War­ hol: A  Retrospective, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 39–61, reprinted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 461– 529; Buchloh’s title alludes to Herbert Marcuse’s term “one-dimensional man.” For alternative interpretations of Warhol’s work in the context of American consumer society, see Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Reconstructing Mod­ ernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 311–326; and Hal Foster, “Death in America,” in October 75 (Winter 1996): 36–59. 41. Brian O’Doherty, “Recent Openings,” The New York Times, December 21, 1963. 42. Irving Sandler, “In the Galleries,” New York Post, December 22, 1963. 43. Barbara Rose, “New York Letter,” Art International (February 1964): 41; and Lucy Lippard, “New York,” Artforum 2, no. 9 (March 1964): 18–19. 44. For more on the Green Gallery, see Judith Stein, Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). 45. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: Univer­ sity of California Press, 1976).

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46. Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International 8, no. 1 (February 1964): 26; see also Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 12–23. 47. Sidney Tillim, “The New Avant-Garde,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 5 (February 1964): 20. 48. Judd had moved from Westwood, NJ to New York City in 1953, first renting a basement apart­ ment at 304 East 27th Street and then moving to a loft at 53 East 19th Street where he lived from 1959 to 1968. See Kopie, “Chronology,” 247, 248. 49. See Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2001), 153–154, 181–182; and John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 223–224. 50. “Twentieth Century Engineering,” press release no. 32, Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Ar­ chives, 1. The catalog divides the list of works into eleven subheadings. 51. “Twentieth Century Engineering,” main wall label, MoMA Exhibition Records, 744.6, MoMA Archives. 52. The use of photo murals in exhibition design was pioneered during the 1920s in Europe, and Mies van der Rohe used it to great effect for his 1947 exhibition at MoMA, which was organ­ ized by Philip Johnson. See Olivier Lugon, “Before the Tableau Form: Large Photographic For­ mats in the Exhibition Signs of Life, 1976,” Études Photographiques 25 (May 2010): 29–31; and Terence Riley, “Introduction: Making History, Mies van der Rohe and The Museum of Modern Art,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 10–23. In the early 1950s Drexler worked under Philip Johnson at MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design before taking over as its director in 1954. 53. “Twentieth Century Engineering,” MoMA press release no. 32, 2. 54. “Twentieth Century Engineering,” MoMA press release no. 32, 3. 55. “Twentieth Century Engineering,” MoMA press release no. 32, 3. 56. Drexler, introduction to Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. 57. Drexler, introduction to Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. 58. Drexler, introduction to Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. 59. Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics After Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 82. Scott briefly discusses Twentieth Century Engineering in the context of numerous other exhibitions Drexler curated during his tenure at MoMA, providing a critical assessment of his contribution to the field of architecture. See also Thomas S. Hines, Architec­ ture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art: The Arthur Drexler Years, 1951–1986 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2019), 91–92. 60. “News: Disappointing Exhibit,” Industrial Design 11, no. 7 (July 1964): 26. For positive re­ views, see Ada Louise Huxtable, “Monumental Works of Man Are Depicted in Show at the New Wings Galleries: Modern Museum Assays Engineering,” The New York Times, June 30, 1964, 35; Ada Louise Huxtable, “Dams, Domes and the Battle of Styles,” The New York Times, July 5, 1964, 15; “Engineering Works Go on Show as Modern Art,” Engineering NewsRecord 173 (July 23, 1964): 28–29; “Significant Forms at Engineering Scale,” Architectural Record 136 (September 1964): 16–17; Robert Colborn, “Review,” International Science and Technology 33 (September 1964): 96; “Approaching an Architecture of the Absurd,” Fortune 70, no. 4 (October 1964): 182; and illustrations on front and back cover of Nation’s Cities, magazine of American Municipal Association (October 1964). 61. The show traveled until 1974. See Museum of Modern Art exhibitions 744.14, 15, and 418, MoMA Archives. 62. Judd, “Month in Review,” 62. 63. Judd, “Month in Review,” 62. 64. Entry in Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. 65. Judd, “Month in Review,” 64. 66. The art historian George Kubler described such objects as having “long durations.” He used the example of cooking pots. See George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962), 38. Judd owned a 1962 edi­ tion of this book; see inventory of Judd’s library, Judd Foundation Archive, New York. 67. Judd, “Month in Review,” 64. 68. Judd, “Month in Review,” 64. 69. Drexler, introduction to Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. 70. Smithson, “Donald Judd,” in 7 Sculptors, 13. In a 2006 conversation with Shannon, Richard Bernstein confirmed that his father’s shop Bernstein Brothers received its metal supply from

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foundries in Pennsylvania. See Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects, 215 n. 49. The spell­ ing in contemporary sources varies between Plexiglas, plexiglas, and plexiglass. I use Plexiglas when referring to the specific brand but otherwise opted for plexiglass since the trademark name became synonymous with acrylic glass. I retain original spellings in citations. 71. Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer­ sity Press, 1995), 78–90. For a contemporaneous source, see Lionel K. Arnold, Introduction to Plastics (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968). 72. For fluorescence and the Switzer Brothers’ invention, see Wesley S. Griswold, “His Magic Makes the World Glow,” Popular Science 162, no. 5 (May 1953): 154–157, 238, 240; and David Cay Johnson, “Robert Switzer, Co-Inventor of Day-Glo Paint, Dies at 83,” The New York Times, August 29, 1997. 73. Lawrence Rubin, Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965, A  Catalogue raisonné (New York: Stewart, Tabori  & Chang, 1986), 233–245. David Batchelor addresses the use of colored plastics by Judd and other contemporary artists in Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 105–107. 74. For steel production during the nineteenth century and its continued development during the twentieth century including its use in building construction, see Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 155–172; and Vaclav Smil, Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 89–113. 75. Holger Svensson, Cable-Stayed Bridges: 40 Years of Experience Worldwide (Weinheim, Ger­ many: Wiley, 2012). 76. See Judd, Complete Writings, 138. Note that the captions for the bridges in Complete Writings were mistakenly swapped. 77. “Don Judd: An Interview with John Coplans,” in John Coplans, Don Judd, (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 41. 78. Barbara Rose, “Looking at American Sculpture: A Series of Important Sculpture Exhibitions in New York Provide a Needed View of Recent Developments,” Artforum 3, no. 5 (Febru­ ary 1965): 33. 79. See entries for DSS 54 and DSS 58 in Smith, Judd: Catalogue raisonné, 121, 124. The entry for DSS 58 has a question mark added to the suggestion that the red box replaced the turquoise one in the Plastics exhibition. On the Plastics show, see Rhea Anastas, “Minimal Difference: The John Daniels Gallery and the First Works of Dan Graham,” in Dan Graham: Beyond, eds. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, and Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 113–115. In his 1971 interview with Coplans, Judd mentioned using four wires in his first two turnbuckle boxes, so it is likely that adding a fifth wire in his red turnbuckle box resulted from the need to improve the box’s stability. See “Judd: Interview with Coplans,” 41. 80. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74–82; reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, 181–189. 81. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 80. 82. “Judd: Interview with John Coplans,” 44. 83. The adjectives hot-rolled and cold-rolled denote the temperature of the metal when it is rolled. 84. The colors of the plexiglass that Judd used for the turnbuckle boxes are indeed frequently mislabeled. DSS 58, for example, is made with red fluorescent plexiglass but is often thought of as being pink or orange, and DSS 83 is made with yellow fluorescent plexiglass even though it appears to be red (see Figure 3.12). Thanks to Ellie Meyer, Catalogue Raisonné Research Manager at the Judd Foundation, for confirming the color designations. On the sensuousness of Judd’s later work, see Richard Shiff, “Every Shiny Objects Wants an Infant Who Will Love It,” Art Journal 70, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 6–33; and William C. Agee, “Endless Possibilities of Color, Continues,” in Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works, ed. Marianne Stockebrand (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 194–227. 85. Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 80; reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, 187. “Specific Objects” was commissioned for the 1965 issue of Arts Yearbook. The issue was to appear in January 1965, but its publication was delayed until late that year, likely because of a change in ownership in late 1964 and the resignation by the editor James Mellow in March 1965; Judd stopped writing for the magazine in early 1965. Arts Yearbook and Arts

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Magazine were both published by Art Digest, Inc., New York, and Mellow was the editor for both until his resignation. See advertising for the forthcoming issue of Arts Yearbook in Arts Magazine 39, no. 1 (October 1964), 3. 86. On the dilemma of conserving the new and shiny surfaces of Judd’s work with some of his pieces from the 1960s showing material signs of aging, see Ann Temkin, “Wear and Care: Ann Temkin Charts the Complicated Terrain Surrounding the Preservation of Donald Judd’s Work,” Artforum International 42, no. 10 (Summer 2004): 204–208, 289. 87. Walter Hopps quoted in Grace Glueck, “Seven for São Paulo,” The New York Times, March 23, 1965. See also The United States of America: VIII São Paulo Biennial (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1965); Walter Hopps, The Dream Colony: A Life in Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 177–184; and Sarah Katherine Rich, “Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman,” PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1999, 22–44. The American exhibition was on view in São Paulo, from September 4 to November 28, 1965, and in Wash­ ington, DC, from January 27–March 6, 1966. 88. Judd, interview by Hooton, 1965, 8. 89. Judd, interview by Hooton, 1965, 8. 90. Judd, “Kansas City Report,” 26. Judd mentions “two recent medium-sized buildings designed by SOM, not bad and not good.” He further elaborated on the BMA Tower, designed by Bruce Graham of SOM. The nineteen-story high-rise, known as the headquarters building for the Business Men’s Assurance Company of America, consists of a clearly articulated frame, five bays wide and three bays deep. See Architecture of Skidmore, Owings  & Merrill, 1963–73 (New York: Architectural Book Publishing, 1974), 120–123; and Bruce Graham of SOM (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 132–135. 91. Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995); 338–342. The authors draw attention to an earlier proposal for a steel-and-glass highrise by Harrison, Abramovitz & Wiggins, but that proposal was not realized. 92. Arthur Drexler, introduction to Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. 93. This is the term Judd used in “Specific Objects,” 74–82. 94. Lewis Mumford, “House of Glass,” The New Yorker, August 8, 1952, 34–38. 95. In a lecture titled “Art and Architecture” that he presented two decades later at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, Judd opined: “The temple looks like civilization. The Kimbell is civilization in the wasteland of Fort Worth and Dallas. The Seagram building is that in New York. These few good buildings are and represent advance and enlightenment in as simple a way as any survey tells you the first building of the Renaissance did.” Donald Judd, “Art and Architecture (1983),” reprinted in Donald Judd: Architecture  =  Donald Judd: Architektur, ed. Peter Noever (Vienna: Museum für Angewandte Kunst; and Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2nd ed. 2003), 28. See also Judd’s lecture “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” written for his 1993 solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amster­ dam, where he referenced the Seagram Building: “The colors of the bronze and the tinted glass of the building by Mies van der Rohe in New York City form as definite a scheme as any with bright colors.” Reprinted in Serota, Judd, 153. 96. Since both works were destroyed, my descriptions are based on photographs, contemporane­ ous reviews, and the 2005 exhibition catalog accompanying a solo exhibition of Grosvenor’s work, which includes descriptions based on conversations with the artist. See David Bour­ don, “Park Place: New Ideas,” Village Voice, November 25, 1965, 11, 25; David Bourdon, “E=MC2 à Go-Go,” Art News 64, no. 9 (January 1966): 22–25, 57–59; Lippard, “New York Letter,” 48–58; Corinne Robins, “Four Directions at Park Place,” Arts Magazine 40, no. 6 (June  1966): 20–24; Richard Swain, “Robert Grosvenor, Leo Valledor,” Arts Magazine 40, no. 4 (February 1966): 55; and Ulrich Loock, Robert Grosvenor (Porto, Portugal: Museu Ser­ ralves, 2005). 97. Burdon, “Park Place,” 25; Swain, “Grosvenor, Valledor,” 55. 98. James Meyer, Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959–1971 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 344. 99. Maurice Tuchman, ed., American Sculpture of the Sixties (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967). For the catalog, Clement Greenberg wrote the essay “Recentness of Sculpture,” which, together with Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” published in the June 1967 issue of Artforum, established the main tenets of minimal art.

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100. Enno Develing, Minimal Art (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1968). 101. Ulrich Loock, Robert Grosvenor (Porto, Portugal: Museu Serralves, 2005). 102. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group (Austin, TX: Blanton Museum of Art, 2008). See also Claudine Humblet’s three-volume La Nouvelle Abstraction Américaine 1960–1970, originally published in French in 2003, in which the author discusses the work of Grosvenor, as well as other long neglected Park Place artists. Claudine Humblet, The New American Abstraction 1950–1970, vol. 3 (Milan: Skira 2008), 1748–1779. 103. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Park Place: Its Art and History,” in Reimagining Space, 6. 104. The sculpture is also known by the title Tapanga in articles written before 1967. 105. See oral history interview with Robert Grosvenor, August 9, 1972. Conducted by Paul Cum­ mings, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; and “Robert Grosvenor with Alex Bacon,” Brooklyn Rail, March 7, 2019. 106. Lippard, “Recent Sculpture as Escape,” 48–58. 107. Lippard, “Recent Sculpture as Escape,” 48. 108. Lippard, “Recent Sculpture as Escape,” 49. 109. Photo no. 14 in Drexler, Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. The structure was dedicated as the McMath Solar Telescope in 1962 in memory of Robert McMath, who had died earlier that year. It was renamed McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope on its thirty-year anniversary in 1992 to also honor Keith Pierce. Both men were instrumental in the planning and realization of the telescope. 110. Loock, Grosvenor, 2005, 46; and Grosvenor in conversation with the author, Patchogue, NY, October 2, 2017. Grosvenor mentioned an article in the in The New Yorker magazine. 111. A second solution that Goldsmith proposed during the final design stage consisted of a canti­ levered shaft only. It was discarded because it was less stable and more expensive than the se­ lected proposal. See photo of models in Werner Blaser, ed., Myron Goldsmith: Buildings and Concepts (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 78. See also James E. Kloeppel, Realm of the Long Eyes: A Brief History of Kitt Peak National Observatory (San Diego: Univelt Inc. 1983), 59–73. 112. For a description and section plan, see Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1963– 1973, 244. See also entry in Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. 113. Kloeppel, Realm of the Long Eyes, 63–64. 114. Goldsmith interviewed by Betty J. Blum in 1986, Oral History of Myron Goldsmith, Chicago Architects Oral History Project (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001), 87. 115. Robert Smithson was in contact with artists at the Park Place Gallery and exhibited his work there during the summer of 1966 and again in that fall. 116. Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 117. Todd Gannon with Reyner Banham, Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), 6. 118. Cited in Kloeppel, Realm of the Long Eyes, 69. 119. “Bold Steps to a Glowing Future,” Life 53, issue 11 (September 14, 1962): 54–65. This spe­ cial issue was dedicated to “The Take-Over Generation,” and covered “its breakthrough in government, science, space, business, education, religion and the arts.” 120. Loock, Grosvenor, 48. 121. Robert Grosvenor, taped interview with Martin Friedman, May 24, 1969, transcript, Walker Art Center Archives, Minneapolis. Cited in Henderson, “Park Place: Its Art and History,” 26. See also Henderson, “Park Place: Its Art and History,” 6, and Henderson, Reimagining Space, 75, plate 30B. 122. In 2017 Grosvenor recounted that he and di Suvero regularly watched progress on the con­ struction of the bridge. Interview with Robert Grosvenor by the author, Patchogue, NY, October 2, 2017. The journalist Gay Talese describes the red appearance of the VerrazzanoNarrows Bridge in his book The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 128. The book features drawings by Lili Réthi and photographs by Bruce Davidson, which are in black and white. 123. Loock, Grosvenor, 46. In connection with the exhibition of Grosvenor’s work at the Mu­ seu Serralves, Loock interviewed the artist in October 2004. Edited excerpts are printed in the exhibition catalog. Loock provides the most detailed description of how Topanga was constructed.

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124. “Shape of Art for Some Time to Come,” Life, May 1967, 38–44. 125. Robins, “Four Directions,” 21. 126. Loock, Grosvenor, 48. 127. The work was, like Topanga, destroyed. It is discussed in the following contemporaneous reviews: Bourdon, “Park Place: New Ideas,” 11, 25; Bourdon, “E=MC2 à Go-Go,” 22–25, 57–59; Lippard, “Recent Sculpture as Escape,” 48–58; Robins, “Four Directions at Park Place,” 20–24; Swain, “Grosvenor, Valledor,” 55. See also Loock, Grosvenor, 48. 128. Lippard, “Recent Sculpture as Escape,” 49. 129. The discussion about hand-made versus factory-made art played out in the symposium “The New Sculpture” organized during the Primary Structures exhibition. It included Mark di Su­ vero, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, critic Barbara Rose, and curator Kynaston McShine. Di Suvero opined that Judd’s work was not art because it was not hand-made. For excerpts, see “The New Sculpture (May 2, 1966),” reprinted in Other Primary Structures, ed. Jens Hoff­ mann (New York: The Jewish Museum, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), n.p; and “The New Sculpture (1966),” in Minimalism, 2010, 220–22. 130. Lippard, “Recent Sculpture as Escape,” 49. 131. Martin Friedman, 14 Sculptors: The Industrial Edge (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1969), 26–27. See also Martin Friedman, “14 Sculptors: The Industrial Edge,” Art International 14 (February 1970): 30–35. 132. James Meyer, “The Art Gallery in an Era of Mobility,” in Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959–1971 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 26; Henderson, “Park Place: Its Art and History,” 11. See also Christopher Knight, “Review: “Where Yellow Means Go and Go Now: LACMA’s Standout Show on ‘60s Dwan Gallery,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2017. 133. William Wilson, “In the Galleries: Exhibit Offers Sure Cure for Pavlov-Raoul Dufy Syn­ drome,” Los Angeles Times (June  10, 1966), D9. For West Coast minimalism, see Dawna Schuld, Minimal Conditions: Light, Space, and Subjectivity (Oakland, CA: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 2018). 134. Loock, Grosvenor, 50. 135. Rosalind Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum 4, no. 9 (May 1966): 24–26; reprinted in Meyer, Minimalism, 211–214. Kopie, “Chronology,” 252. 136. Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion,” 25. 137. Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion,” 25. See also Alexander R. Bigman, “Architecture and Objecthood: Donald Judd’s Renaissance Imaginary,” Oxford Art Journal 40, no. 2 (August 2017): 263–286. 138. Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion,” 26. 139. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2011); first published in 1945 in French, and translated into English in 1962. See also Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); and Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44; reprinted in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985): 276–290. 140. In an essay written with Robert Slutzky, Colin Rowe distinguished between literal and phenomenological transparency; see more in Chapter  5. Colin Rowe with Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta 8 (1963), 45–54; reprinted in Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 159–183. See also Rosalind Krauss, “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materializa­ tion of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman,” Architecture + Urbanism (January 1980): 189–219. 141. Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–74 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), 80–83, 184–185, 477. 142. Curated by William Seitz, the exhibition featured contemporary paintings and constructions. William C. Seitz, The Responsive Eye (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965); see also Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 45–55. 143. Rosalind Krauss, “Afterthoughts on ‘Op’,” Art International 9 (June 1965): 75. See also Lucy Lippard, “Perverse Perspectives,” Art International 11 (March 1967): 28–33, 44.

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144. Richard Shiff, “Bridget Riley: The Edge of Animation,” in Bridget Riley, ed. Paul Moorhouse (London: Tate Gallery, 2003): 80–91; Henderson, “Park Place: Its Art and History,” 38–39. 145. In March 1967 Transoxiana was exhibited in a group show at the Lincoln Towers in Denver, where the exhibition space had even taller ceiling heights. See contact sheets of James Mil­ moe’s photographs from the exhibition, in Henderson, Reimagining Space, inside covers. 146. Karen Wilkin, Kenneth Noland (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), cat. no. 134. On Noland’s Vshaped works, see also Diane Waldman, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective (New York: Solo­ mon R. Guggenheim Foundation in collaboration with Harry N. Abrams, 1977), 27–30. 147. Michael Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cam­ bridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965); Michael Fried, “Anthony Caro and Kenneth Noland: Some Notes on Not Composing,” Lugano Review 1 (Summer 1965): 198–206; and Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” Artforum 5, no. 3 (November 1966): 18–27. 148. The V-shape is most dominant in Slieve Roe; the series mostly includes combinations of differ­ ently oriented V-shapes expanding the width of the canvas while retaining a constant height of about 6½ feet. See Rubin, Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965, 209–219. For these works Stella used paint made of metallic powder mixed with a polymer emulsion. He had experimented with aluminum paint in 1960. Like Grosvenor and Judd, Stella had an abiding interest in architecture. For these aspects in Stella’s work, see William S. Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 45–46, 92–101. Caroline Jones examines the work of Stella alongside Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson in relation to industry, technology, and corpo­ rate culture. She develops the notion of the “technological sublime” to capture “a complex hybrid of technological progressivism and pastoral ideal.” See Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54. 149. Matthew L. Levy, Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critique (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2019), 5. See also Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 124–126. The original version of Judd’s “Specific Objects” ended with the work of Stella pointing to the new possibilities, but Judd changed the original version. Roberta Smith pointed out that the revised version of “Specific Objects” reflected Judd’s “distaste for Stella’s change of course.” Roberta Smith, untitled essay, in The Writings of Donald Judd: A Chinati Foundation Symposium, ed. Mari­ anne Stockebrand and Richard Shiff (Marfa, TX: The Chinati Foundation), 68–69. 150. Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion,” 26. 151. Wilson, “In the Galleries: Exhibit Offers Sure Cure,” D9. 152. Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 149– 163. The experience of a sculpture in time was often referred to as its fourth dimension. An exhibition entitled 4D featuring works by artists that were part of the Park Place Gallery was held at the Daniels Gallery in February  1965. Henderson explored the importance of the fourth dimension for the artists of the Park Place Gallery, recovering its metaphysical meaning. See Henderson, “Park Place: Its Art and History,” 8–11; and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); revised edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). See also Elise Archias, The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, Vito Acconci (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 153. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42–44; and Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 20–23. For a more sustained discussion of the essays, see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 153–166. 154. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). See also James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1950). 155. Only concurrently with his “Notes on Sculpture, Part II” did Morris increase the complexity of his works as, for example, demonstrated in his 1966 solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Dwan Gallery, which included four battered cubes. By exhibiting four of them together, Mor­ ris gave viewers four different views of the polyhedrons, so that the gestalt of the work was intelligible in a single glance. Meyer, Dwan Gallery, 68–69. 156. Bourdon, “E=MC2 à Go-Go,” 25. 157. Grosvenor in conversation with the author, Patchogue, NY, October 2, 2017.

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158. Loock first clarified that the photo depicted the model of Topanga. Loock, Grosvenor, 46. For the self-conscious staging of sculpture in photographs, see Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two Dimensions: Photography and the Matter of Sculpture (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 159. Joseph Masheck, “Robert Grosvenor’s Fractured Beams,” Artforum 12, no. 9 (May 1974): 36. An aluminum version of Topanga also existed. The Lannan Foundation, led by Patrick Lannan, who was one of the sponsors of the Park Place Gallery, provided the financial sup­ port to industrially fabricate the work and then acquired it for the Foundation’s collection. Despite the more durable material, the aluminum version of Topanga did not survive. 160. Frank Stella, cited in Lippard, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” 55–61. 161. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 74. 162. Grace Glueck, “Anti-Collector, Anti-Museum,” The New York Times, April 24, 1966. 163. Hilton Kramer, “Art: Reshaping the Outermost Limits; ‘Primary Structures’ at Jewish Museum, ‘Conception over Craft’ is Credo of 42 Artists,” The New York Times, April 28, 1966. 164. Hilton Kramer, “‘Primary Structures’—The New Anonymity,” The New York Times, May 1, 1966. His third article is entitled “An Art of Boredom,” The New York Times, June 5, 1966. 165. “Engineer’s Esthetic,” 64–67. 166. “New Druids,” 35; see also Robins, “Object, Structure or Sculpture,” 37. 167. Huxtable, “Monumental Works,” 35. 168. Huxtable, “Dams, Domes,” X15. 169. Judd’s earlier work would have seemed small in such company. Indeed, as an earlier instal­ lation photograph shows, McShine had considered placing Walter De Maria’s work Cage in Gallery 5, but the relatively small size and its open-lattice design made it almost disappear among the other immense works. It was moved to another room. For the Primary Structures exhibition, see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 13–30; and Bruce Altshuler, The AvantGarde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 220–235. 170. James Meyer interview with Kynaston McShine, January 30, 1992, and with Lucy Lippard, December 2, 1991. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 22, 273n25. In her essay written for the Minimal Art exhibition in The Hague, Lippard made numerous references to architec­ ture. See Lippard “10 Structurists in 20 Paragraphs,” in Minimal Art, ed. Enno Develing (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1968), reprinted in Goldstein, A Minimal Future?, 25–31. 171. Lippard, “Recent Sculpture as Escape,” 49. See also Dictionary of Art Historians, s.v. “Lip­ pard, Lucy R.,” ed. Lee Sorensen, www.arthistorians.info/lippardl [accessed March 8, 2019]; and oral history interview with Lucy Lippard, March  15, 2011. Conducted by Sue Heine­ mann at Lippard’s home in Galisteo, NM. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 172. Lucy R. Lippard, “As Painting Is to Sculpture: A Changing Ratio,” in American Sculpture of the Sixties, 31. 173. See for example John R. Blakinger, Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019); and Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midecentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT 2020). 174. The exhibition was on view from February 6 to March 5, 1967. The exhibition also included work by Bladen and von Schlegel. Christopher Andreae, “Sculptures that Fill Buildings: View­ er’s Involvement,” The Science Monitor, February 24, 1967, 4. 175. Completed in 1959, the Loeb Student Center was a modernist steel-and-glass structure de­ signed by the firm Harrison & Abramovitz. It was torn down in 2000 and replaced with the Kimmel Center. 176. Samuel Adams Green, Art for the City (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, Univer­ sity of Pennsylvania, 1967). The work was made with painted aluminum and plywood, 11 × 45 × 45 in. 177. Samuel Green cited in Grace Glueck, “On the Whole, It’s Avant-Garde: Philadelphia Shows Way-Out Sculptures in Public Places,” The New York Times, January 28, 1967, 19. 178. Renamed in 1968 as the Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs Administration. 179. Maurice Tuchman, Art and Technology: A Report on the Art & Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971).

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180. See Anne Collins Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vi­ etnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology,’ ” Leonardo 41, no. 2 (April  2008): 169–173. 181. Tuchman, interviewed by Ann Collins Goodyear, February  2, 1999; cited in Ann Collins Goodyear, “Launching ‘Hybrid Practices’ in the 1960s: On the Perils and Promise of Art and Technology,” in Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, ed. David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner (Oakland, CA: Univer­ sity of California Press, 2019), 36. 182. Twentieth Century Engineering, n.p. See also Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1971). 183. Robert Grosvenor, in Loock, Grosvenor, 64.

4

Monuments, Landmarks, and Ruins Claes Oldenburg and Robert Smithson

In the early 1960s Claes Oldenburg created numerous proposals for colossal outdoor works in the form of drawings and text. One of the earliest was Monument to Immi­ gration, a written proposal from 1961. Oldenburg described this monument, which he envisioned in Upper New York Bay, as follows: “The monument would begin as a reef placed in the bay; a ship would sail in, hit the reef, and sink; soon another would do the same; and after a while, there’d be this big pile of wrecked, rusting ships which, as it grew, would be visible from quite a distance.”1 Like the dams, roads, bridges, and towers that inspired numerous minimal artists includ­ ing Judd and Grosvenor, sea-going ships were impressive feats of modern engineering. And yet in Monument to Immigration, vessels that once embodied Western notions of progress and triumph became an eroding mass of wrecks. Rather than emphasizing the functionality and newness of such structures, Oldenburg as well as Robert Smithson paid attention to the effects of time and history on materials, forms, and meanings. Critically, in their work, both artists revealed the destructive aspects of modernization and considered the experi­ ences of an audience that was largely excluded from Western, technocratic conceptions of progress. Taking inspiration from the tangled forces of modernization and preservation, Oldenburg and Smithson envisioned monuments, landmarks, and ruins that opened up the functionalist conception of the built environment to other styles, narratives, and values. Preservationists were generally opposed to the efforts of modernist architects, plan­ ners, and developers; they sought to save old, inefficient, and dilapidated structures from the wrecking ball rather than support the construction of new functionalist buildings. In 1963 preservationists rallied against the destruction of New York City’s Pennsylvania Sta­ tion, a turn-of-the-century beaux-arts building designed by McKim, Mead & White, that was to give way to a state-of-the-art underground train station topped by the Madison Square Garden sports and entertainment arena. While unable to save the grand old build­ ing, their protests resulted in the 1965 establishment of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, a government agency with the power to designate buildings as protected monuments. Preservationists at the time were keen to save, restore, and pre­ serve the finest examples of Western architecture, in particular examples of the decorative nineteenth-century beaux-arts style that modernists had despised. The Landmarks Pres­ ervation Commission also began to consider the sociohistorical meanings of buildings, so that a neighborhood like SoHo with its extant nineteenth-century industrial structures was seen as worthy of monument status. Such efforts and stances raised key questions: Who had the right to decide which buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes were to be preserved and remembered while others were destroyed and forgotten?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003295105-4

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Like preservationists, Oldenburg and Smithson designated existing structures, build­ ings, and objects as monuments to endow them with new value and public meaning. They were not, however, interested in pristine restoration and material preservation but in complicating and broadening the narratives inscribed in the built environment. In these endeavors, Oldenburg’s practice was more closely aligned with the strategies of pop art in that he referenced structures, objects, and locations that featured in current public discourses and resonated with popular predilections. By analyzing his Monument to Im­ migration and subsequent proposals from the 1960s, this chapter shows how his work intersected with specific contemporary modernization, preservation, and reclamation ef­ forts—in particular the heated discussions around the future of the then-derelict Ellis Island Immigration Stations and the controversial plans to build an expressway across Lower Manhattan. In his imagined monuments, Oldenburg played with scale to render everyday consumer items and foodstuffs as colossal objects within the built environment, thus transforming them into civic monuments on a par with feats of modern engineering. His monuments cleverly upended the capitalist, patriarchal logic inscribed in the forms of the built environment and, at the same time, expanded upon the narrow, formalist trajectory of modernist art. Smithson similarly endowed existing objects, structures, and locations with monu­ mental import. In works such as The Monuments of Passaic (1967) and Hotel Palenque (1969/72), the artist photographed little-known, mundane structures to frame them as worthy of aesthetic contemplation. Smithson’s work thus wittily reverberated with no­ tions of ordinariness that played into the development of both minimal and pop art. Analyzing his nominal monuments as formally equivalent to renowned structures, land­ marks, and archeological ruins reveals how his interventions expanded conceptions of the built environment not only in terms of differing aesthetic values but also regarding larger historical, social, and geopolitical forces. In his practice, Smithson captured the complex entanglements of modernization, preservation, and reclamation efforts. At the same time, his entropic conception of materiality and temporality was central to a poststructuralist reframing of avant-garde art. During the late 1960s, Oldenburg and Smithson addressed art’s situatedness in re­ lation to specific surroundings, diverse epistemologies, and changing temporalities, thereby rejecting art’s autonomy. Both expanded their practices into the environment, pioneering the artistic genre of earthworks which was canonized as earth or land art. Suzaan Boettger began her 2002 study Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Six­ ties with Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument (1967), positioning it as the first artwork that used dirt or earth during the 1960s.2 Smithson is prominent in accounts of land art and is one of the movement’s most significant figures. In their practice, Oldenburg and Smithson advanced the story of avant-garde art and at the same time responded visu­ ally, materially, and conceptually to the processes of monumentalization as they played out in the built environment. They incorporated wreckage, ruination, and devastation as part of their nominal monuments, narrating histories that differed significantly from the heroic story of Euro-American modernism. Both artists looked beyond the center to designate, frame, and create new types of landmarks that revealed social, political, and environmental injustices. However, they worked from a white, male, Western posi­ tion of privilege. By making destruction, decay, and ruin subjects for aesthetic contem­ plation, they risked redoubling art’s aloofness from lived experiences, hardships, and struggles.3

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Claes Oldenburg Oldenburg’s imagined Monument to Immigration wittily defied notions of a traditional monument: The structure was not permanent, and it did not glorify a past event.4 Once the reef was in place, ships would run aground one after another and slowly accumu­ late. After some time, the stranded shipwrecks left in the salty waters of the bay would begin to rust and eventually crumble, while new ships would arrive and follow the same process. Monument to Immigration thus continuously changed its size, shape, and mate­ rial composition. This transformation all but conveyed immigrants’ hope for a new and prosperous life. The artist explained: “What occurred for most of the immigrants was a disaster: America simply wasn’t what they’d expected.”5 An American dream built on ideals of social mobility, economic growth, and technological progress contrasted with the realities of exploitation, oppression, and poverty experienced by many immigrants as well as by people of color and the working class more broadly. Conceived in 1961, Monument to Immigration was thematically and chronologically tied to Oldenburg’s environments and happenings of the early 1960s. He pioneered these genres together with Allan Kaprow, who, in his 1958 essay on Jackson Pollock, aptly described large abstract expressionist canvases as efforts to expand beyond the limits of painting to create environments.6 Oldenburg’s The Street of 1960 and The Store of 1961 were paradigmatic examples of such environmental installations that also served as stage sets for performances. As Achim Hochdörfer, Joshua Shannon, and Cécile Whiting have shown, Oldenburg’s work pushed the boundaries of the formal-aesthetic achievements of abstract expressionism by expanding beyond the limited frame of the canvas into the environment.7 Monument to Im­ migration may be understood in the same terms: as an enormous happening set in New York Bay. The imagined pile of rusting ships also served as a precursor to Oldenburg’s drawings of proposed monuments of the mid-1960s, in which he rendered everyday objects and food items in colossal form within the built environment. In her 2021 monograph The Accidental Possibilities of the City: Claes Oldenburg’s Urbanism in Postwar America, Katherine Smith reframes the identification of Oldenburg’s practice with various stylistic movements, from happenings, environments, and pop art, focusing instead on the artist’s “foundational and enduring relationship with the city as the critical perspective of his career.”8 She convincingly argues that “Oldenburg proposed his developing practice as simultaneously reflective, resist­ ant, and redemptive: artistic innovation and social activism.”9 Monument to Immigration is an imaginary proposal—an idea visualized in the artist’s mind, articulated with words, and later recorded and archived as part of an interview. Despite its immateriality, Monument to Immigration was, as Oldenburg stated, “my first obstacle monument.”10 Many of the colossal monuments he subsequently rendered on paper also qualify as obstacle monuments, even though they, too, were conceived to remain unbuilt. At the time, modern architects and planners used the term “obstacle monument” to denote useless, particularly figurative memorials dedicated to America’s military victories, which they derided as nuisances that interrupted the smooth, efficient flow of the city. By appropriating the term for his avant-garde practice, Oldenburg clev­ erly and humorously challenged and reframed established conceptions of modern art, architecture, and urban planning. His imagined monuments assert the vital role of art as an audacious practice with the power to shape not just critical discourse but also the social and material spaces of everyday life. The Mothball Fleet

In Monument to Immigration, Oldenburg envisioned the transformation of functioning ships into wrecks unable to fulfill their original purpose. The artist cited as inspiration

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Figure 4.1 National Defense Reserve Fleet, Jones Point, Hudson River, ca. 1968. Source: Courtesy Nyack Library Local History Image Collection.

an existing fleet of ships that had become a monument by a similar process. In the early 1960s a group of Liberty and Victory ships were moored at Jones Point on the Hudson River, about forty miles north of Manhattan (Figure  4.1). These ships, almost 200 of them, were part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, more colloquially referred to as the “Mothball Fleet.” After serving as cargo ships during World War II, they were moth­ balled for possible future use. The fleet, however, was rarely called upon, and efforts to maintain it or modernize it with newer and faster vessels had low priority. When these vessels were summoned for action in the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, commercial ship builders referred to them as “rust buckets.”11 Despite their approaching obsolescence, the ships were admired by the public, both for their monumental size and the historic role they had played during World War II. The sight of the fleet was so popular that New York State created a number of lookout points along Highway 9W, which runs along the Hudson’s west bank. At one of these points, a small plaque recounting the fleet’s historical significance was installed, thus affirming its status as a monument. The Mothball Fleet consisted of large, plainly visible physical ob­ jects that triggered the public’s remembrance of a historic event. The Liberty and Victory ships, with their sturdy-looking gray steel hulls, each about 450 feet long, recalled the scale of traditional public monuments. While inactive with regard to naval and military duties, the fleet pointed to a significant and glorious past. It represented the technologi­ cal, economic, and military might the nation had displayed during World War II.12 The Mothball Fleet would seem to occupy a special category of monuments because it was not intentionally built as such. Along with automobiles and airplanes, large ocean­ going vessels were the result of modern technological innovations and, like the engineer­ ing feats discussed in Chapter  3, became symbols of an advanced society. They had served Le Corbusier as an inspiration in the development and promotion of a new, mod­ ern architecture.13 The Mothball Fleet, however, hardly pointed to a prosperous future but rather initiated the memory of a bygone era. Alois Riegl, in his classic text “The Modern Cult of Monuments” (1903), addressed the importance of age in the creation

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of what he called unintentional monuments, which included formerly functioning struc­ tures, ruins, and landmarks. Indeed, he pointed out that the majority of monuments can be classified as unintentional, since, with the passing of time, even intentional monu­ ments are appreciated for their age and patina.14 Unintentional monuments were at the heart of the historic preservation movement that rose to prominence during the 1960s. Preservationists aimed to save and restore old buildings, structures, and neighborhoods that often had outlived their original function or were no longer in step with standards of efficiency but embodied significant national events. Oldenburg enacted this process of monumentalization in his own proposal: functional seagoing craft metamorphosed into vessels of public meaning. However, the artist called for neither the restoration nor the preservation of the stranded ships. Rather, wreckage, dilapidation, and decay continued to shape the materiality of the once-functioning ves­ sels. If actually realized, such a monument would have been unacceptable not only to preservationists and modernists but also environmentalists, as the decaying ships would start leaking toxic materials. In the case of the Mothball Fleet, authorities elected to dis­ mantle the “rust buckets” in 1971, an event that occasioned the replacement of the small plaque at the lookout point with a more elaborate memorial marker commemorating the now-absent fleet. The new monument consisted of a rock about four feet tall with two anchors leaning against it; embedded in the rock was a plaque with an image of the fleet and a text commemorating the fleet’s history (Figure 4.2).15 Thus was the materially disintegrating fleet transmuted into an image deemed to more appropriately represent the might of a technologically advanced civilization. In Monument to Immigration, Oldenburg reframed the ships he had encountered along the Hudson to embody the processes and challenges of becoming American. It

Figure 4.2 Reserve Fleet Marker that commemorates the Hudson River National Defense Reserve Fleet at Jones Point. Erected by the US Department of Commerce, Maritime Adminis­ tration, July 1971. Source: Courtesy Nyack Library Local History Image Collection.

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was a theme Oldenburg could relate to. Born in 1929 in Stockholm to Swedish parents, Oldenburg was himself an immigrant. At age one, he moved with his parents to New York City, where his father was attaché at the Swedish consulate. The following year his father was appointed to a position in Oslo, where the family lived for two years, before moving back to the United States and settling in Chicago in 1936. After high school, Oldenburg studied at Yale University, graduating with a degree in English literature in 1950. Deciding to pursue a career as a visual artist, he returned to Chicago, where he studied at the School of the Art Institute while working as a reporter and illustrator for a local newspaper. At that time, he also became familiar with the teachings at the Institute of Design (also known as the Chicago Bauhaus), which significantly influenced his art. At age twenty-four, he sought to become an American citizen and was naturalized in Decem­ ber 1953.16 Jo Applin is one of the few scholars who has considered the artist’s status as an immigrant in relation to his practice. Analyzing the monument proposals that Olden­ burg conceived for New York and London, she argued that they “are the product of an artist who positions himself as out of place, as a stranger.”17 Oldenburg was an immigrant, but his path had been one of privilege, bilingual educa­ tion, and international travel. Moving to Manhattan in 1956 to further pursue his artistic career, Oldenburg found an affordable living and studio space in the Lower East Side. There he was confronted with a population of working-class immigrants whose lives played out in stark contrast to his own. Their social status and economic struggles were closely entangled with the status of the built environment, which city officials deemed decrepit and blighted. In a 1973 interview Oldenburg recalled, “The Lower East Side was a very new experience for me. . . . I was put into a social situation and also a kind of geography that I had never seen before.”18 Indeed, in some of his happenings of the time, such as Fotodeath (1961) and Injun (1962), Oldenburg addressed not only issues of im­ migration but also racial stereotyping.19 In his monument proposals, he made visible how discrimination and marginalization of immigrant populations were inscribed within the contemporary built forms around him. Ellis Island

By proposing an island of wrecked ships in New York Bay, Oldenburg referenced objects and locations that were significant within the history of immigration as well as contem­ porary debates on the topic. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of immigrants sailed into New York Bay on large ships. Most of them debarked at Ellis Island, located just off the southern tip of Manhattan, where the federal immi­ gration center was located. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, after the center had become derelict, the mnemonic significance of Ellis Island in commemorating the role of American immigration was hotly debated. Should the island, with its outmoded build­ ings, become a national monument? How would this monument be preserved, and what message would it convey? Exploring the history of Ellis Island and the various futures en­ visioned for it during the 1960s shows how Monument to Immigration directly engaged with contemporary architectural discourses. Over 12 million immigrants entered the United Stated through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. It was the place where people were processed, examined, and granted or denied entry into the country. The island’s main building was the Immigration Station. Designed by the New York firm Boring & Tilton, it was completed in 1900 in the thendominant beaux-arts style, welcoming over 2,000 immigrants on its first day of opera­ tion (Figure 4.3). Additional structures, such as a hospital and ferry terminal, were built shortly thereafter to accommodate the immigration procedures. To that end, the natural

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Figure 4.3 G.W. Peters, New Building for the Immigrant Station, Ellis Island, New York Harbor— Boring & Tilton, Architects, 1898. Halftone photomechanical print, 8 1/4 × 12 3/4 in. The New York Public Library, Wallach Division Picture Collection, NY. Source: Courtesy New York Public Library Digital Collection.

3.3-acre island was enlarged with landfill over time, ultimately growing to 27.5 acres.20 By the mid-1920s, however, new laws restricted the number of immigrants allowed into the United States and reassigned their processing to American consular offices abroad, eclipsing the initial function of the Ellis Island center. The Immigration and Naturaliza­ tion Service continued to use the buildings as a detention facility—for illegal entrants awaiting deportation, enemy aliens during World War II, and immigrants suspected of politically subversive convictions—before abandoning the island in 1954.21 Over the next decade, the federal government deliberated about the future of Ellis Island while the buildings fell into disrepair. In 1956 an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal touted it as “one of the most famous landmarks in the world” and offered the island for sale, suggesting it was suitable for manufacturing, warehouses, or an oil-storage depot. Aside from a few low-ball offers, the announcement mostly generated outrage among the public.22 Many people treasured Ellis Island as the place millions had entered the United States and, as such, the beginning of many inspiring success stories. They called for it to be declared a national monument and its Immigration Station to be restored and preserved. Others, however, countered that the island was simply a plot of land with unused buildings—why not allow a private business to use or replace these structures for economic benefit?23 Some even argued that Ellis Island was a humiliation for immigrants, a place where they were forced to endure physical and psychological examinations, cast as exotic foreigners, and detained for questionable political opinions. What is more, only steerage passengers were sent to Ellis Island after first-class travelers had disembarked to Manhattan. Many believed the true spirit of the immigration experience was better

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symbolized by the nearby Statue of Liberty, which since 1886 had greeted arriving immi­ grants sailing into New York Bay with its promise of freedom and opportunity. Oldenburg’s proposal contrasted sharply with both a pristinely restored Immigration Station and an economically profitable new structure. By allowing once-functioning ships to run aground, to rust and crumble, Monument to Immigration created awareness of the material processes of time. A restored Immigration Station, by comparison, would high­ light the immutability of the structure and memorialize a monolithic image of the past. However, that past was complex and hardly representable in a single material state. Over its first twenty years of use, the building changed continuously as it was used by millions of people, producing wear and tear; some damage was repaired, and structural additions were built. While advocates for a functional new construction embraced change and thus were untroubled by tearing down the old buildings, their focus on the future was under­ stood in terms of economic profit. A  functional, profitable structure—be it a business center or hotel—eschewed the passage of time. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, public opinion in New York City came to sup­ port protecting historic buildings from demolition. Realizing that alarmingly large parts of the urban fabric were vanishing due to ambitious renewal projects in the postwar era, a sizeable group of New Yorkers, including committed preservationists and urban activists, fought against the widespread destruction of buildings and neighborhoods. While they failed to save Pennsylvania Station (it was demolished in 1963), preservationists achieved a major victory two years later when New York City established the Landmarks Preser­ vation Commission and granted it the power to denote historically significant buildings as protected monuments.24 A comparable federal law, the National Historic Preservation Act, was signed the following year, 1966. Preservation commissions were charged with the task of deciding which structures mer­ ited landmark status. Initially, they focused on architecturally significant buildings, but the criteria for admittance into the canon of architectural history were changing. Modernist architects and historians had, for example, spurned beaux-arts buildings, with the style re­ ceiving renewed appreciation only in the 1960s. The Ellis Island Immigration Station was considered by many a minor example of that style and thus not certain to be preserved as a landmark. Throughout the late 1960s, the mission of historic preservation continued to expand, not only assessing architectural and aesthetic import but also a building’s social history.25 Under these premises, the station designed by Boring & Tilton was worthy of preservation as much for its significance within the history of immigration as its style. The debate over Ellis Island came at a time when immigration itself was being reevalu­ ated. During the late 1950s and early 1960s the US Congress set out to reform restrictive immigration laws, which were based on a quota system dating to the 1920s and gave preference to northern Europeans. This culminated in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which focused on merit and family reunification rather than nationality as the main criteria for admittance. Proponents of the bill understood their efforts as applying the ideals of equality, as espoused in the civil rights movement, to immigration policy by rectifying what they viewed as a decidedly un-American law. Immigration and the concomitant national diversity of the American people were portrayed as a positive and foundational aspect of the United States, as eloquently espoused in then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s 1958 essay “A Nation of Immigrants.”26 In accord with public sentiment, Ellis Island was declared a national monument in May  1965. As it was under federal jurisdiction, this task was executed by President Lyndon B. Johnson with Proclamation 3656, which designated Ellis Island part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. During the dedication ceremony of the Ellis Is­ land monument, Johnson emphasized the positive aspects of immigration and diversity,

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surely aware of the fine tuning of the Hart-Cellar Act then underway in advance of its final vote in Congress later that year. In his speech, Johnson reminded listeners that millions of immigrants had come to the United States “through the open doors of Ellis Island.” He continued: “These men, women and children from many lands enriched the American melting pot. They made us not merely a nation, but a nation of nations.” Ellis Island, he suggested, was to become a “handsome shrine.”27 Oldenburg’s proposal challenged such an anodyne image of immigration and national unity. The artist dedicated his monument to immigration, thus validating immigrants’ sig­ nificance in shaping the culturally diverse American nation. However, his monument—not without some mischief—portrayed immigration as a process of social collision and material wreckage. It was, to be sure, a site of tribute, but one that conveyed the complex realities of the 1960s, when the political future and material history of immigration were vigorously contested. In fact, hardly anyone envisioned the wide-reaching transformation of America’s white Protestant majority into such a racially, religiously, and culturally diverse population in the wake of the 1965 immigration reform bill. The continuing changes in America’s iden­ tity and the clashes they sparked are still very much part of the immigration debate today. Obstacle Monuments

Oldenburg’s preoccupation with the monumentalization of Ellis Island in 1961 contin­ ued in a number of his drawings for colossal monuments, created four years later. Ex­ ecuted with crayon and watercolor on paper, these works were first exhibited as part of a group show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in May 1965 (the month Ellis Island became a national monument).28 Shortly thereafter, Oldenburg created Proposed Colossal Monu­ ment for Ellis Island: Frankfurter with Tomato and Toothpick (Figure 4.4) and Proposed

Figure 4.4 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument for Ellis Island: Frankfurter with To­ mato and Toothpick, 1965. Crayon and watercolor, 19 1/8 × 24 in. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; gift of Mr. Michael and Mrs. Dorothy Blankfort, Los Angeles (to AFIM). Source: © Claes Oldenburg. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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Figure 4.5 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument for Ellis Island: Shrimp, 1965. Wax crayon and watercolor on paper on board, 11 7/8 × 15 15/16 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of The American Contemporary Foundation, Inc. Source: © Claes Oldenburg. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Re­ source, NY.

Colossal Monument for Ellis Island: Shrimp (Figure 4.5). He presented these works at his solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery the following year.29 On view from March 9 to April  2, 1966, these drawings marked a seemingly stark contrast to the minimalist “monuments” presented in the Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, which opened just a few weeks later, at the end of April (see Chapter 3). The monuments that Oldenburg rendered in his drawings of the mid-1960s mostly take the form of foodstuffs and consumer items: a hot dog, a shrimp, a pair of scissors, a tabletop fan. Critics and scholars positioned these lighthearted and colorful watercolors as examples of pop art. Jo Applin, however, observed that Oldenburg’s monuments, par­ ticularly those he envisioned for New York, revealed a menacing side. She thus restored the seriousness of Oldenburg’s monument drawings, arguing that they reframe and de­ familiarize urban experiences through the artist’s subjective, embodied vision.30 In her monograph, Katherine Smith further explored how Oldenburg’s drawings intersected with specific contemporary urban discourses in New York City.31 Oldenburg was keenly aware that the making, designating, and preserving of monuments was not just a matter of subjective, aesthetic taste but reflected current hierarchies, values, and epistemes that shaped the lives of people. His pop imagery intersected visually, materially, and concep­ tually with urban politics creating multilayered meanings that negotiated the boundary between subjective perception and public meaning. In his sly practice, Oldenburg made productive the trope of the obstacle monument—a term used by architects, critics, and planners to denote the uselessness of grand, elaborate, at times figurative memorials—to insist on the public value of art. Oldenburg’s proposed monuments consisted of common, recognizable things, which he carefully chose in relation to the proposed site. He designed his monuments as visual analogies of typical features of the built environment, transmuting existing structures

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into pop art. For example, the artist explained, “The giant Frankfurter on Ellis Island has a shape in common with the ships that pass down the Hudson into the bay.”32 The frankfurter’s elongated shape and the protruding toothpick mirror the forms of a ship’s hull and mast. This transformation from ship to hot dog might not be readily accessible without the artist’s explication, but when revealed, these formal analogies resonate and are even thrilling. As Julian Rose aptly observed, Oldenburg “celebrated formal slippages and pseudomorphisms.”33 In another example, Proposed Colossal Monument—Fan in Place of the Statue of Liberty, Bedloes Island (1967), the rotating blades of a fan recall the Statue of Liberty’s radiating crown. For this proposal, Oldenburg considered physi­ cal, environmental experiences of the site in addition to formal analogies. He explained that a monumental electric fan taking the place of the Statue of Liberty would produce air currents typical of New York Bay.34 Oldenburg effortlessly transformed industrial structures and buildings into foodstuffs or morphed a beloved symbol of American lib­ erty into a mundane everyday object. The transformations at work in Monument to Im­ migration were thus not merely those of decay and destruction but of visual, formal, and environmental analogies and metamorphoses that create multiple layers of meanings. In all of these proposals, the colossal scale of the food and consumer products played an important part in the process of monumentalization. The hot dog became a monu­ ment not because of what it represented but because Oldenburg made it enormous. The actual drawing of the frankfurter is only about seven inches long, appropriate for a food we hold in our hand. However, in relation to the depicted landscape—the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan are indicated on the far right, and the New Jersey shoreline expands along the horizon—the frankfurter appears as a colossal structure that floats on New York Bay. Even the passing ships are small in contrast to their monumental presence in Oldenburg’s earlier proposal. In these drawings, Oldenburg also productively used titles to confirm the colossal dimensions of his imagined monuments. This is helpful, as at times the depicted object is not readily identifiable. Proposed Colossal Monument for Ellis Island: Shrimp, for example, depicts a rather abstract, vaguely organic form that hovers on the surface of New York Bay. With just a few lines of turquoise charcoal and a few layers of pink wash, Oldenburg hints at the curled form of a shrimp, cleaned and prepared for human consumption, but it is hardly rendered realistically.35 The title leaves little doubt that what, at first sight, we might identify as a naturally occurring outcrop­ ping or maybe an inflatable structure floating on the water, is a shrimp. Oldenburg cleverly drew on the multiple meanings of words to imbue his monuments with layers of significance. The word “Frankfurter” not only denoted a sausage served in a bun but also a resident of the German city of Frankfurt, thus alluding to the foreigners who immigrated to America via Ellis Island and their culinary traditions that have been incorporated into American culture.36 And, of course, “shrimp” can mean both a type of crustacean enjoyed as food and, colloquially, a small and physically weak person—that is, the opposite of the heroic male figure for which monuments have traditionally been erected. Further associations accrue: The frankfurter drawing was initially titled Colossal Monument for Ellis Island—Hot Dog with Toothpick, with “hot dog” also describing a person who is showing off. Oldenburg, who was fluent in both English and Swedish and studied English literature, would have been attuned to the fluid relationship between words and their meanings.37 Just as he effected the transformation of ordinary objects into shrines, so his titles underline that conversion and wittily subvert the heroic and monolithic tradition of monuments. Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway N.Y.C.— Block of Concrete, Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes (1965; Figure 4.6) seemed to fit more comfortably within traditional notions of monuments.38 Not only was the

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Figure 4.6 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broad­ way, N.Y.C.—Block of Concrete, Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes, 1965. Charcoal and watercolor on paper, 16 × 12 in. Museum of Modern Art, bequest of Alicia Legg. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ira Licht, New York. Source: © Claes Oldenburg. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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depicted monument enormous in size, but its simple rectangular shape mirrored the geo­ metric forms of an architectural structure rather than a food item or consumer object. Indeed, its geometric shape was reminiscent of the boxlike sculptures that contemporary artists such as Judd, LeWitt, and others were creating at the time. In the drawing, how­ ever, the minimal sculpture was imagined at the scale of civil engineering projects like those featured in MoMA’s Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition (see Chapter  3). The block that Oldenburg envisioned for Canal Street was massive in scale—150 feet wide—and made of a solid gray concrete. Yet its inspiration, the artist explained, was far more modest: the pat of butter topping a baked potato. In the United States, baked pota­ toes are often served with the skin split and a slab of butter served on the revealed flesh. The pat of butter placed in the heart of the potato corresponded visually—albeit with a significant change in scale—to the rectangular block of concrete Oldenburg imagined for the intersection of Canal Street and Broadway.39 This minimalist-looking monument thus developed from a slab of butter, a form that is malleable, melts, and disintegrates. Rather than eliciting awe and admiration from modernist planners, engineers, and the public, the colossal block of concrete was more likely to cause dismay and disorder. The monument would have completely occupied one of the busiest intersections in New York City. Canal Street was one of the main east-west arteries across Manhattan, connecting Brooklyn, via the Manhattan Bridge in the east to Holland Tunnel that led westward to New Jersey in the west. The junction with Broadway provided access to the finan­ cial district downtown, and Broadway itself was one of the island’s major north-south streets. To erect a monument hindering all traffic flow at this key intersection would be a nightmare for motorists. Drivers would likely try to turn around, heightening the chaos with oncoming traffic.40 This monument stands bluntly in the way; it is, like Monument to Immigration in New York Bay, “a true obstacle monument.”41 Such monuments were anathema to postwar architects and urban planners, who em­ braced the functionalist dictum. In urban planning, their aim was to build an efficient and rational city. Large, traditional monuments that had been an integral part of beaux-arts city planning were seen as distractions, secondary in importance if not to be avoided all­ together.42 Anticipating the commission of numerous war memorials after World War II, luminaries in the architecture world as diverse as Percival Goodman, Philip Johnson, Robert Moses, and Lewis Mumford all argued against the viability of traditional monu­ ments. Already in 1937 Mumford had written an essay entitled “The Death of the Mon­ ument,” criticizing those memorials dedicated to immortalizing the dead without any benefit to the living.43 In his 1944 article “Real War Memorials,” Goodman described a monument in Pennsylvania erected after World War I as a “traffic hazard” and disparag­ ingly labeled the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, along with the monuments in London’s Tra­ falgar Square and New York’s Columbus Circle, “sites for traffic congestion.”44 Oldenburg seems to have been aware of these discussions. In a 1968 interview he explicitly referenced one of the negative examples Goodman had cited, comparing his Block of Concrete monument to the Arc de Triomphe (Figure 4.7), which he classed as “an aggressive obstacle in that traffic must be rerouted around it.”45 What’s more, Olden­ burg proposed monuments for the very places Goodman had identified as “sites for traf­ fic congestion”: Columbus Circle and Trafalgar Square. Proposed Colossal Monument for Columbus Circle, N.Y.C.—Silex Juicit depicts a menacing, bulbous, and overblown blender. Squeezed between a column that featured a statue of Christopher Columbus and the surrounding office towers of Midtown Manhattan, the Juicit blender blocks all traffic on the roundabout. As in the case of Block of Concrete, such a monument would cause

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Figure 4.7 Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, Paris, with car traffic and people walking in foreground, 1951. Gelatin silver print, 8½ × 8½ in. Designed by Jean Chalgrin, the monument was inaugurated in 1836. Source: Photograph courtesy Malcolm Fairman/Alamy Stock Photo.

utter disarray and chaos. When traveling to London in 1966 to install his solo exhibi­ tion at the Robert Fraser Gallery, Oldenburg created Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square—Gearstick in Motion (Figure 4.8). The drawing features an enormous gear stick that towers above the old city of London, with the National Gallery of Art indicated in the background and the steeple of St. Martin-in­ the-Fields to the right. In the upper left corner Oldenburg pasted a newspaper clipping showing an aerial view of Trafalgar Square with a multitude of city busses standing bumper to bumper next to Nelson’s Column, illustrating Goodman’s assessment of the plaza’s functionalist failure. Like Nelson’s Column and the Arc de Triomphe, Block of Concrete is a war memorial. As Oldenburg indicated in the drawing’s subtitle, the names of servicemen who fought and died for their country were to be inscribed on the surface of this massive monu­ ment. Such honor rolls are typical of war memorials since the late eighteenth century and traditionally served to glorify the accomplishments of military leaders as an example of inspiring nationalism and power. For example, the Arc de Triomphe, completed in

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Figure 4.8 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace the Nelson Column in Tra­ falgar Square—Gearstick in Motion, 1966. Crayon, watercolor, and paper collage on paper, 15¾ × 22¾ in. Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of UBS. Source: © Claes Oldenburg. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

1836, features the names of high-ranking officers. By the early 1900s, however, it was common for monuments to list the names of all servicemen who had died, regardless of rank. Particularly after World War II, these memorials became more democratic and thus also pointed to the great human cost of war.46 A World War II memorial enumerating all dead American servicemen would comprise over 400,000 names, a shockingly long list when visualized on a monument.47 Oldenburg’s proposal acknowledged—with a portion of wit and irony—the symbolic value of monuments but also complicated the heroic nar­ ratives of American exceptionalism by implicating experiences that were representative of a broader public. LOMEX

Robert Moses had the power to shape the urban plan of New York City during the postwar period. As the so-called master builder, a title denoting his many influential roles in city and state administrations, he was intent on modernizing New York by con­ structing a network of expressways, tunnels, and bridges guaranteeing fast and efficient transportation for motorists. He oversaw such projects as the Cross-Bronx Highway, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and the 178th–179th Street Tunnels. The construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), conceived as the main east–west artery to ease traffic congestion on Canal Street, was one of his major projects slated for construc­ tion during the 1960s. Plans for such a cross-town expressway had been considered since the late 1920s, but it was not until 1960 that the New York City Planning Commission

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Figure 4.9 Artist’s rendering of an elevated Lower Manhattan Expressway, looking east towards Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, in Joint Study of Arterial Facilities, New YorkNew Jersey Metropolitan Area, published by the Port of New York Authority, Tribor­ ough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, New York, 1955. Source: Courtesy of HathiTrust.

approved a detailed proposal brought forth by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Au­ thority headed by Moses. The proposed eight-lane elevated thoroughfare was to provide a route free of obstacles, be they stoplights, pedestrians, or monuments, when driving through New York City from the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges to Holland Tun­ nel (Figure 4.9).48 Conceived in the spirit of modernization serving the greater good, the construction of highways through densely populated areas had devastating consequences for af­ fected neighborhoods and residents. On the positive side, LOMEX would relieve the neighborhood’s surface streets of heavy traffic, making short trips in the area faster and more pleasant. Easier access to the area via LOMEX would increase business and prop­ erty values, attract investors, spur new construction, and produce higher real-estate tax revenues. The predicted improvements were thought to be significant, because the affected areas—including the neighborhoods of SoHo, Little Italy, and Chinatown— were marked by declining business activities, neglected buildings, and depressed prop­ erty values. On the negative side, the project called for the eviction of almost 2,000 households and over 800 businesses, with many of them relying on the current afford­ able rents in the area. Families that were previously struggling to survive were pushed further into poverty and had to face the challenges of finding and adjusting to a new

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living situation. Moving a manufacturing shop, such as a small textile or printing busi­ ness with its heavy machinery, was a costly undertaking often concomitant with a loss of established clientele and thus not feasible for shop owners already under financial duress. The proposed expressway would also be accompanied by an overall increase in traffic, noise, and air pollution.49 The announcement of the construction of LOMEX was met with intense public re­ sistance. Opponents, mainly residents of the affected areas, organized as the Joint Com­ mittee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway and voiced their discontent during public hearings, in newspapers, and with their political representatives. The work of writer, urban activist, and New York City resident Jane Jacobs played an important role in mobilizing grassroots resistance to large-scale urban renewal projects. Her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961 and presented strong arguments for the social and economic vitality of old, densely populated, innercity neighborhoods, which were to be destroyed by projects like LOMEX.50 The New York City Board of Estimate—the administrative body that made final decisions on the city’s budget and land use—was not unsympathetic to critics of the project and was ap­ prehensive about the negative impacts on families and businesses. A final vote was de­ layed for two years. In December 1962, after a heated six-hour public hearing, the Board of Estimate unanimously voted against the expressway, concluding that its construction was “not in the urgent public interest” and would bring “economic and social blight.”51 Two years later, however, efforts to construct LOMEX were rekindled. The express­ way was never removed from the official city plan, and groups in favor of its construction united as a stronger front. In addition to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which had proposed the plans for LOMEX in the first place, major proponents of the project were the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association and the City Central Labor Council. The former represented businesses from the downtown area that were com­ mitted to the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan with the goal of upgrading what they thought of as blighted neighborhoods near their headquarters. Chase Manhattan Bank had invested more than $100 million dollars in the construction of its headquarters, a steel-and-glass skyscraper designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, completed in 1961.52 Harry Van Arsdale Jr., president of the City Central Labor Council, supported the expressway on the grounds that three other major construction projects depended on it, with about one-third of the aggregate $590 million investment slated for wages. With the construction industry starting to slump in the mid-1960s, these projects would safe­ guard a significant number of blue-collar jobs. In addition, the $110 million price tag of LOMEX was almost entirely financed by federal and state funds.53 Thus, the economic advantages for the city and its workers were enormous. Mayor Robert Wagner was fac­ ing reelection in November  1965, and his campaign depended on the donations and votes of unions and their members. Despite continuing opposition, the Board of Estimate green-lit LOMEX on May 25, 1965.54 Mayor Wagner did offer some solutions to address the plight of the families and busi­ nesses that had to relocate. He announced the construction of a low-income housing pro­ ject in the immediate neighborhood, which would provide 460 apartments for displaced families and individuals. Affected persons also would receive priority in public apartment blocks available south of 14th Street. In addition, a $3 million fund was established to provide grants to the businesses that had to move.55 While these measures were positively received, most critics of LOMEX opposed the construction of new housing blocks in cit­ ies just as much as the expressway, since both necessitated the razing of older buildings

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and the eviction of residents and small businesses. The proposed housing projects, de­ signed according to the principles of modernist functionalism, were but geometric blocks of concrete typical of postwar urban renewal projects. It was in this context that Block of Concrete took on a specific local and contemporary meaning. By depicting a literal roadblock in his drawing, Oldenburg critiqued the city’s LOMEX plans as deeply flawed and destructive. The artist cleverly employed key charac­ teristics of urban renewal projects whereby a simple modernist form no longer promised efficiency but was employed in opposition to a controversial project. From a functionalist urban perspective, monuments and public sculptures might appear useless obstacles; they hindered rather than contributed to economic progress as defined within a Western capi­ talist logic. But Oldenburg insisted on their value; works of art shaped public discourse and impacted the future to be built. Oldenburg’s imaginary monuments of the mid-1960s were over the top, garish, and outrageous. Their power was firmly rooted in being understood as art, allowing viewers to move between the realms of imagination and reality, between a mischievous gesture on paper and the consequences of actual construction. In 1965 three architecture students from Cornell University—in line with Oldenburg’s playful avant-garde imaginings— explored the viability of building Block of Concrete. In considering the real-life chal­ lenges involved, the students elucidated the conditions that differentiated the production of art from the design and realization of architectural works. According to the students’ report, simply erecting the block of concrete on the street would have caused a disaster. The slab would weigh about 500  million pounds and sink into the ground, crushing the subway tunnels running beneath Broadway. To prevent such damage, the students suggested first building a foundation designed to protect the subway tunnels. To this end, construction crews would have to excavate the area down to bedrock, an estimated forty to ninety feet below street level. To cast the slab of concrete above grade, the stu­ dents recommended using a low-heat type of Portland cement and placing cooling coils throughout to prevent the cement from cracking (a technique commonly employed by engineers in the construction of large dams). Four-foot-high slip forms erected around the perimeter of the site would slowly be propelled upward by forty-eight electrically driven screw jacks as concrete was poured into the rising forms.56 As architects became intrigued with Oldenburg’s imaginary proposals, the possibil­ ity of actually realizing them did not seem so far-fetched after all. His drawings were featured in numerous architectural journals, which exposed his ideas to an audience concerned not just with designing but also realizing and building structures. The Italian architecture and design magazine Domus, for example, featured Oldenburg’s monuments in the December 1965 issue.57 The following year, the Austrian magazine Bau, catering to readers from the architectural professions, conducted and published an extensive in­ terview with Oldenburg.58 Subsequently the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked the artist to speak to its students and faculty about his projects. Recalling this event, Old­ enburg said: “I felt honored but rather terrified of being caught out of my element. . . . It’s a bit frightening to me to be taken seriously, and I have to decide whether I really want to convert my fantasy to real projects, and on what terms this can be done.”59 Placid Civic Monument

In 1967 Oldenburg had the opportunity to realize his first publicly commissioned sculp­ ture. He was invited to participate in the exhibition Sculpture in Environment, for which curator Samuel Green commissioned twenty-four artists to create works to be placed

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throughout Manhattan. Initiated by the New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, the project was headed by Parks Commissioner August Heckscher, with the aim of bringing contemporary art out of museums and galleries and into public spaces. For his contribution, Oldenburg initially suggested parking buses at a number of intersections throughout Manhattan, thus causing traffic jams—a true obstacle monu­ ment, albeit in nonpermanent form. (This project mirrors the situation captured in the newspaper clipping of Trafalgar Square included in his Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace the Nelson Column.) Not surprisingly, Green and Heckscher rejected the idea but—after discussing a few other options—approved Oldenburg’s proposal for Placid Civic Monument (Figure 4.10).60 On the morning of October 1, 1967, the artist set out to realize the monument. He hired a group of workers and met them behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Cen­ tral Park. Oldenburg instructed the workers to dig a hole six feet long, three feet wide, and six feet deep. The workers hacked into the ground with pickaxes and shovels and moved roughly 108 cubic feet of dirt to make a rectangular hole. The pile of excavated dirt next to it grew as the workers progressed. After taking a lunch break, Oldenburg instructed the crew to shovel the dirt back into the hole and level it with the surrounding ground. The day’s labor completed, the work was nearly invisible to passersby; eventu­ ally grass would grow over the area again, so that not even the location of the excavation would be identifiable.61 For this work, Oldenburg created a hole that complemented his Block of Concrete. He designed both monuments as simple rectangular forms for New York City: one would stand at a busy intersection blocking traffic; the other was located in an open, rather quiet part of Central Park. In light of the size and aggressiveness of the earlier proposal, Placid Civic Monument would initially seem to be an act of surrender; it may be interpreted as embodying not only art’s disappearance but also the artist’s acquies­ cence to the demands of a functionalist ethos that saw art but as a useless nuisance or distraction. Oldenburg had, in fact, conceded to the authorities who refused to approve his bus traffic jam project.62 Nevertheless, Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument did func­ tion as an obstacle monument—a work of avant-garde art that questioned hegemonic forms of knowledge production as they played out in the material and social spaces of the built environment. Placid Civic Monument was barely visible, yet it made a significant impact. The under­ ground earthwork was accompanied by controversies and repercussions that expanded beyond its material form. Indeed, it was the discourse around the hole that imbued Placid Civic Monument with permanence. On the morning Oldenburg executed the work, a ceremony with high-ranking officials and art patrons inaugurated the Sculpture in Envi­ ronment exhibition as part of a larger citywide festival showcasing the arts. Addressing the audience, Thomas Hoving, the director of the Metropolitan Museum and the former parks commissioner, mentioned Oldenburg’s work: “They are digging a grave right in back of the Metropolitan. . . . Whether I’m supposed to jump into it I don’t know.” Also on the dais was Mayor John Lindsay, who picked up the theme of “the square hole” and said it was to be “a final resting place for ex-Park Commissioners.”63 Turning to the current parks commissioner August Heckscher, Lindsay added: “There’ll be room for you too, Augie, when the day comes.”64 These references to Oldenburg’s work, which were broadcast on television, stirred the interest of the press. The New York Times re­ ported on the artwork and the officials’ remarks the next day, triggering additional ar­ ticles, cartoons, and public comments questioning the meaning of the hole, all of which

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Figure 4.10 Claes Oldenburg, Placid Civic Monument, 1967. Central Park, New York. Photo­ graph shows Cleopatra’s Needle in the background; the obelisk was quarried in Upper Egypt about 3,500 years ago, shipped to New York in 1879, and installed and inau­ gurated in Central Park in 1881. Source: Photograph Fred W. McDarrah, New York City Parks Photo Archive.

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contributed to the notoriety of the invisible work. In his diary, Oldenburg described Placid Civic Monument as “an aesthetic event,” one that included public discussions and printed articles as well as the conceptual development of the piece in negotiation with the curator and city administrators.65 Oldenburg turned “the mechanisms of the city into aesthetics, i.e., nonfunction.”66 The association of Placid Civic Monument with a grave was surely intended, as Old­ enburg used that word in his diary entry alongside his reference to a pit, a trench, and a tunnel. The dimensions of the hole and the fact that the hired workers were professional gravediggers made the association unavoidable.67 Oldenburg explained that neither a body nor an object was buried in the hole, meaning it more accurately referenced a ceno­ taph: an empty tomb. After World War I the cenotaph became popular for the design of memorials to commemorate the many individuals who had namelessly died in the war. Oldenburg called Placid Civic Monument “a perfect (anti) war monument,” and scholars, such as Suzaan Boettger and Robert Haywood, have accordingly interpreted the work as an act of protest against the Vietnam War.68 In 1967 public opposition to America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia intensified. An estimated 100,000 to 400,000 antiwar protesters had convened in Central Park in April, and in November an­ other 100,000 Americans marched on the Pentagon to voice their discontent. In his read­ ing of the work, Robert Slifkin expanded the meaning of Placid Civic Monument beyond an anti-Vietnam War statement to a more general grappling with the existential anxiety surrounding nuclear war and human annihilation in the postwar era. The sculpture thus functions as a countermonument—a term introduced by James Young to describe the Holocaust memorials built in Germany and Austria during the 1980s—that questioned teleological notions of progress.69 In addition, Placid Civic Monument had sexual connotations that became obvious by its placement. Oldenburg sited the work in an open area just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the eastern edge of Central Park, adjacent to an Egyptian obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle (Figure 4.10). Erected there in the late nineteenth century, the granite obelisk was inscribed with hieroglyphs celebrating the military victories of Ramesses II. The sixty-eight-foot-tall obelisk was a typical heroic, phallocentric monu­ ment, while the barely visible hole acted as its critical, contemporary counterpart.70 The two monuments—one rigid and upright, the other recessed and yielding—mirrored rep­ resentations of the male and female genitalia. Additional characteristics emphasized such a gendered reading: hard and defined granite versus soft and formless earth; permanent and eternal versus temporary and inconspicuous. In his notes on Placid Civic Monument, Oldenburg reinforced such binary sexual metaphors, writing “This thing we broke like a wound.” Shortly thereafter he continued this thought stating, “I felt great excitement at the moment of first incision of the shovel. The first shovelful was surprisingly red and accounted ‘virgin’ by the diggers.”71 The gendered forms and erotic content of Placid Civic Monument were readily ac­ knowledged by the artist and his contemporaries. Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, in par­ ticular, have been associated with erotic subject matter. Critics thought their undulating forms were reminiscent of the female body and contrasted them with the rational, geo­ metric, and rigid forms of modern technological innovations conceived, by many, to be masculine. In addition, the techniques and materials used to craft soft, stuffed, sewn fabric sculptures were typically considered female.72 Yet rather than simply replicating gendered stereotypes, Oldenburg played with the multivalent meanings of forms. Soft Switches 1/2 of 1964, for example, transforms the ubiquitous electrical device normally cast in hard plastic into a large, sagging, malleable sculpture. In a review of Oldenburg’s

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1964 solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Donald Judd observed that Soft Switches 1/2 “is grossly enlarged and soft, flaccid, changed and changeable. It seems to be like breasts but doesn’t resemble them, isn’t descriptive, even abstractly. There aren’t two breasts, just two nipples.”73 In his book Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field, David Getsy addressed the transgender possibilities of abstract sculptural practices, ex­ ploring their possibility to upend binary readings.74 Oldenburg’s work, while representa­ tional, similarly invites multiple, queer readings. The drawings of monuments that Oldenburg proposed for Ellis Island in 1965 also playfully reverberated with traditional conceptions of gendered forms. The frankfurter and the shrimp have sexual connotations, especially when read as a pair. The sausage rep­ licates a phallic shape, while the monumental shrimp is curled in such a way as to form a convex form around a hole, which some may read as a tunnel for the passing ships and others as a vaginal cavity. Likewise, the rectangular piece of butter placed in a cut potato and by extension the enormous block of concrete for the intersection of Canal Street and Broadway are ripe with sexual allusions. In these works Oldenburg drew on and at the same time upended the implied phallocentrism of geometric, rationalist forms—and thus the masculinist culture of domination—through representational and formal means. What’s more, the frankfurter and the pat of butter—just like the shrimp—are food items not meant to last; they will be devoured, melt, and disappear. Oldenburg rendered these monuments with loose, organic lines and washes of color that defy the forms’ perception as rational, powerful, eternal. The food items seem to merge with their environment; they are part of it rather than dominate it. In 1967 Oldenburg proposed to replace the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, DC, with a pair of scissors. In the drawing entitled Proposed Colos­ sal Monument to Replace the Washington Obelisk, Washington D.C.—Scissors in Mo­ tion, the artist transformed the phallic obelisk, erected in the nineteenth century to honor the revolutionary general and first president of the United States, into shears opened at an acute angle (Figure 4.11). The scene is rendered with fluid lines of charcoal and bathed in washes of brilliant reds and oranges, creating an ominous atmosphere that may hint at the death and destruction caused by warfare. The bloodlike color also harks back to Oldenburg’s description of the diggers’ “surprisingly red” incision in the earth when making Placid Civic Monument. Oldenburg imagined the phallic obelisk on the National Mall as a pair of scissors, a tool associated with tailoring and sewing and thus with the realm of female handiwork. In Placid Civic Monument and Scissors in Motion, one might detect a tribute to the powers of Patty Mucha Oldenburg, the artist’s wife at the time, who sewed many of the soft sculptures. She wielded her needle and scissors with dexterity and skill to transform immaterial ideas into three-dimensional objects. Her crucial role in the production of Old­ enburg’s work of the 1960s was long unacknowledged. As part of an effort to diversify the art historical canon of the long sixties that was dominated by white male artists, art his­ torians have recovered, in particular, the work of female artists and artists of color. Patty Mucha, for example, was featured in the 2010 exhibition Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists: 1958–1968. In an essay for the accompanying catalog, Mucha described her role in sewing the soft sculptures, a labor-intensive activity for which she was neither cred­ ited nor reimbursed. At one point, she refused to do the work, and her husband set out to do the sewing himself—with disastrous results. Mucha’s refusal highlighted not only the importance of manual labor but also her husband’s dependence on her skills.75 Despite—or because of—this division of labor, Oldenburg retained his superior posi­ tion as the creative artist and took sole credit for the artworks, thus endorsing a hierarchy

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Figure 4.11 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace the Washington Obelisk, Washington D.C.—Scissors in Motion, 1967. Crayon and watercolor, 30 × 19 3/4 in. Private collection. Source: © Claes Oldenburg. Photograph courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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that placed male-coded creativity above female-coded handiwork. While Oldenburg’s professional practice perpetuated a stereotyped gendering that played into patriarchal structures of power, his writings and artwork were permeated with a sense of parody, humor, and wit that did much to undermine existing binaries of gender. Placid Civic Monument took the form of a hole, which became a powerful symbol for second-wave feminist artists, such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who asserted their value in a male-dominated world. Women artists purposefully employed the forms, materials, and techniques that carried pejorative meanings and transformed them into symbols of power. They painted and sculpted vaginal forms, with some artists sewing, knitting, and crafting their work from fabrics and fibers and others working with the earth and nature to reconceive negative value judgments that had been naturalized in Western society. Within a feminist, intersectional framework, Placid Civic Monument lends it­ self to a transgendering not only of sexual identities but also of the natural and built environments. Earthworks: The LOMEX Tunnel

At the time, the New York City metropolitan area was—as Oldenburg witnessed firsthand—full of holes. As part of urban modernization, workers operated earthmoving machines excavating enormous pits to pour foundations for new skyscrapers, creating tunnels for subway trains, cars, buses, and trucks, or building canals to reroute rivers. One of the holes still looming large on the horizon of Manhattan in 1967 was LOMEX. Even though Mayor Wagner and the Board of Estimate had approved the plans for the crosstown expressway in May 1965, no progress had been made. John Lindsay, a mem­ ber of the US House of Representatives, had declared his candidacy for mayor of New York City running against Wagner. He opposed the current plans for LOMEX and filed an injunction claiming that the Board of Estimate had received false information about the project. This accurate yet minor accusation was unlikely to derail the construction of LOMEX, but it postponed the project long enough for the mayoral election to take place. In June, Wagner announced his withdrawal from the race, and five months later a major­ ity of New Yorkers voted for Lindsay. After a year in office and having removed Robert Moses from his staff, Lindsay, rather than abandoning LOMEX altogether, proposed a bold new plan for an underground expressway: A tunnel running sixty feet below street level, beneath train and subway lines.76 Such a solution would make the expressway with its thousands of cars and trucks invisible. A New York Times editorial called it an “im­ aginative new approach to an old and very difficult problem.”77 Imaginative, yes, but was it realistic? Feasibility studies were commissioned to ex­ plore the task of digging a two-mile-long tunnel underneath the island of Manhattan without altogether halting vehicular traffic, subway lines, and daily life during its con­ struction. The challenges and costs proved prohibitive, and a more realistic compromise combining a tunnel with a submerged, open-cut highway and a surface road was an­ nounced. As shown in drawings published in March 1967 (Figure 4.12), this version of LOMEX consisted of a tunnel at its eastern end (from Manhattan Bridge to Mulberry Street), emerged as an open cut (through Chinatown and SoHo) and then took the form of a surface road at its western end (West Broadway to Holland Tunnel).78 LOMEX would make its way below, above, and in between existing tunnels. About 1.5 million cubic yards of earth would have to be excavated for the project. By the fall, plans had

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Figure 4.12 Plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, combining tunnel, open-cut, and surface road; cross section looking east on Broadway, in Clayton Knowles, “New Plans Pre­ pared for Downtown Expressway,” The New York Times, March 28, 1967. Source: From The New York Times © 2023 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

further evolved, and Mayor Lindsay received positive feedback from the state and fed­ eral governments, which were to fund the $150 million project as part of the interstate highway system. As of October 1967 LOMEX promised to be an expressway that was nearly invisible, but the negative social repercussions for the affected neighborhoods remained. The open cut and surface sections of the expressway—three-quarters of its length—still called for the razing of old buildings along with the eviction of families and businesses. The mayor’s office projected that about 650 homes and 400 commercial structures would have to be razed (down from 2,000 and 800, respectively, in the 1965 plan).79 The open-cut section of the expressway was visually less obtrusive than its earlier elevated counterpart, but it would still destroy the cohesiveness and vitality of Chinatown, Little Italy and SoHo. Other effects, such as increased air pollution due to a higher traffic volume in Lower Manhattan, would remain just as real and problematic as before. Groups that had op­ posed the 1965 plan were not appeased. In Placid Civic Monument, Oldenburg skillfully deployed forms, materials, and pro­ cesses that were integral to the planned construction of LOMEX. He instructed workers to excavate dirt, creating a rectangular cut in the ground, which became almost invisible once the dirt was filled back in. His diary notes on Placid Civic Monument, written im­ mediately after its realization and over the following days, include references to a pit, a trench, and a tunnel. On the same pages, he jotted down the words: “A tunnel to China” and “Earthworks.”80 The latter is a common engineering term for projects involving significant excavations of soil, such as tunnels, canals, and mines. In the 1964 exhibition Twentieth Century Engineering, curator Arthur Drexler devoted an entire room to some of the most impressive examples of earthworks, including the Chesapeake Bay BridgeTunnel in Virginia; the Fort Lauderdale diversion canal, complete with new peninsulas for housing; and the Miike Colliery artificial island in Kyushu, Japan.81 There is no doubt that the 1967 version of LOMEX qualified as a major earthwork.

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The visual forms, materials, and processes Oldenburg used for Placid Civic Monu­ ment conveyed multiple, even contradictory meanings. He stated: “I  will, for my art­ ist’s part, maintain that the grave association (or pit or trench or tunnel, etc.) is not the point. While admitting it (deliberately) obscures the point, in order to throw my artistic reasons into sharper relief.”82 He also observed that had he buried something in the excavated plot, that object would become the center of attention. Oldenburg was not interested in creating a self-contained or self-referential sculpture—he spoke of the traditional monument as one “of the concentrated object kind”—but in the meanings of visual and material forms that continuously changed as part of larger structural and con­ ceptual frameworks.83 Placid Civic Monument did not preclude meaning or subscribe to a nihilistic relativity of meaning; rather, it encouraged multiple associations and slippages between the realms of avant-garde art and architectural discourses. Oldenburg’s invisible artwork was a forceful critique of contemporary sculpture’s selfreferential and acquiescent role in society. An empty hole could not be grasped as a mate­ rial, self-contained object because it was defined by its surroundings: the dirt all around it. Taking it a step further, the hole was filled back in, making it difficult to distinguish the excavation from its surroundings. In his diary, Oldenburg noted that “little enough separates the dirt inside the excavation from that outside (a thin line if represented in a drawing) so that the whole park and its connections, in turn, enter into it.”84 Sculpture in Environment was an attempt to take art out of exclusive museum and gallery spaces to make it accessible and thus relevant to a broader public. Some artists, curators, and administrators understood this endeavor in terms of changing the location of artworks from inside to outside. Oldenburg saw it as an opportunity to create meaningful equiva­ lences between art and the built environment that played out on formal and concep­ tual levels. The sculptural void necessitated a focus on its surroundings, specifically the broader material, social, and political context by which it was defined. The forms of Placid Civic Monument gained meaning in relationality to the reigning discourses that were shaping the built environment. The work constituted another “true obstacle monu­ ment,” one that upended notions of progress as defined within a Western capitalist logic, one that was not as placid as its title seemed to suggest. Robert Smithson Robert Smithson was not invited to participate in Sculpture in Environment, but that did not prevent him from creating a public artwork of his own. On Saturday, September 30, 1967, while final preparations for next day’s official opening of Sculpture in Environ­ ment were underway, he took a journey exploring the built environment of Passaic, New Jersey, a suburb about twelve miles northwest of Manhattan. During the course of his trip, Smithson saw numerous ordinary structures—a rotating bridge, for example— photographed them, and identified them as monuments (Figure 4.13). The artist turned this outing into an essay titled “The Monuments of Passaic,” which he published along with six of his photographs in the December issue of Artforum.85 Describing Passaic, Smithson slyly suggested that “maybe an ‘outdoor sculpture show’ would pep that place up.”86 Like many artists at the time, Smithson was keen to take art out of the museum. But rather than creating sculptures for public places, he positioned the visual and material forms he encountered around him as art. Like much minimal and pop art, Smithson’s work engaged with everyday, mundane, even banal subject matter that existed within the built environment. “The Monuments of Passaic” exemplifies Smithson’s interest in creating public art that is situated beyond the exclusive spaces of the museum or gallery.

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Figure 4.13 Robert Smithson, The Bridge Monument Showing Wooden Sidewalks, photograph shot with an Instamatic 400 camera, from “The Monuments of Passaic,” 1967. The National Museum, Norway. © 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In an earlier essay, Smithson conveyed the irrelevance of the contemporary museum by comparing it to a tomb.87 However, Smithson referenced the tomb not only in terms of social irrelevance and historical stasis but (like Oldenburg) as a cipher of possibility—a void that shifts attention from the center to the margins. Moving from inside the museum to out of doors signified more broadly a shift from the center of contemporary avant­ garde art to the spatial, temporal, and aesthetic margins. In geographical terms, “The Monuments of Passaic” describes a journey from Manhattan to the suburbs; chronologi­ cally, it starts in the present, that is, the mid-twentieth century, and takes readers into the future and back to various moments in the past; and within the aesthetic realm, the work expands the elitist conception of fine art to include ordinary objects, functional buildings, and dilapidated structures that are part of everyday life. In a 1967 dialogue with Allan Kaprow, Smithson explained: I’m interested for the most part in what’s not happening, that area between events which could be called the gap. This gap exists in the blank and void regions or set­ tings that we never look at. A museum devoted to different kinds of emptiness could be developed.88

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Smithson’s comments, writings, and art were characterized by irony and contradiction, and as such elide definite meanings. Building on French poststructural theory, art critic Craig Owens, for example, described Smithson’s “earthwords” as a form of allegory in which meaning is always deferred.89 Owens thus emphasized the subjective, individual, and highly eclectic character of Smithson’s work. Jennifer Roberts’s book Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History is exemplary in acknowledging poststructural readings while at the same time repositioning the artist’s work within historically specific narra­ tives.90 In the chapter “Forgetting Passaic,” she recounts numerous local contexts of Pas­ saic to “restore some of the historiographical complexity out of which Smithson’s own version emerged.”91 Roberts’s historiographies—especially her exploration of contempo­ rary discourses around modernization and preservation as they played out in the built environment—suggest that Smithson wanted us to consciously see these other histories that incorporate dilapidation, destruction, and devastation. Nevertheless, she interprets Smithson’s art as producing “an indifferent accumulation of perspectives.”92 By paying particular attention to formal, visual, and structural affinities and slippages between the ordinary structures that are pictured in Smithson’s art and the monuments, landmarks, and ruins that shaped contemporary architectural discourses, I reposition his practice as one that is not simply eclectic and subjective or even nihilistic but concerned with the public realm. The Monuments of Passaic

When considering “The Monuments of Passaic,” it is difficult to precisely define what constitutes the work. Are we to focus on the actual structures described and represented in the article, the photographs of these monuments, or the published article? Or is it the initial journey the artist undertook in September 1967, and the tours he conducted thereafter? While all of these objects and activities can be posited as art, they achieve their full potential in relationship to each other. Smithson designated ordinary structures as monuments, which then became pictures and words that were both a means to and proof of their transformation. He recorded and materialized his journey in an illustrated article, which then guided the realization of subsequent tours during which participants could again frame mundane, everyday structures as monuments and transform them into pictures and words. The various material, visual, and conceptual processes incorporated into The Monuments of Passaic (italics denote the artwork in its various iterations while quotation marks reference the published essay) were closely entwined with reality, its representation and interpretation. The work could not be grasped as a self-contained or autonomous object. Such an intermedia approach suspended any remaining vestiges of modernist medium specificity.93 In “The Monuments of Passaic,” Smithson echoed the efforts of Donald Judd when he explored the ordinary built environment of his home turf in “Kansas City Report” (see Chapter 3). Smithson was born in Passaic, grew up in neighboring towns, and, after moving to Manhattan, visited the area frequently to see his parents. Like Judd, Smithson took a journey to an area that had shaped his youth, explored the ordinariness of its built environment, and wrote an essay based on what he saw. Judd’s “Kansas City Re­ port” revealed his sources of inspiration and artistic concerns; it rooted his art within a specifically American, Midwestern trajectory. For Judd, however, writing was an occupa­ tion that financially supported his artistic endeavors.94 Smithson, by contrast, understood his journey, viewing the structures, photographing them, and writing and publishing the article as integral to his art. His avant-garde practice enabled him to conceptualize

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monuments beyond physical, material objects and entangle them, like art, within larger sociohistorical and geopolitical frameworks and epistemologies that questioned onedimensional narratives of both aesthetic and social progress. Judd and Smithson developed a cordial relationship during the mid-1960s around their common interest in new materials, industrial manufacturing, and architectural and engineering discourses that played into their endeavor to expand art beyond painting. Smithson’s first published essay was a three-page text on Judd’s work commissioned for the catalog that accompanied the 1965 exhibition 7 Sculptors at Philadelphia’s Insti­ tute of Contemporary Art.95 Shortly thereafter, Smithson, Judd, and their wives—Nancy Holt and Julie Finch—took an excursion to the quarries of New Jersey, which resulted in Smithson’s essay “Crystal Land,” published in Harper’s Bazaar in May 1966.96 The following month, Smithson published an expansive and eclectic review of the Primary Structures exhibition that appeared in Artforum under the title “Entropy and the New Monuments.”97 In these essays, Smithson moved beyond works of art to reference con­ temporary buildings, urban and industrial environments, and other literary, scientific, and popular sources. However, all the images pictured in these publications were works of art. In the fall of 1966, Smithson started incorporating photographs of the built envi­ ronment in his published writings, with “The Monuments of Passaic” being one of the most successful.98 “The Monuments of Passaic” begins with Smithson boarding bus number 30 at the Port Authority Building on 41st Street in Manhattan. During the ride to the New Jersey suburbs, he glanced at the passing landscape outside the window. He also leafed through The New York Times and the science-fiction novel Earthworks by Brian Aldiss that he had purchased at the bus terminal. Smithson exited the bus at the Union Avenue Bridge, which led over the Passaic River. From there, he strolled along the river’s west bank, where Route 21 was being constructed, before turning west to the center of Passaic. Roberts reconstructed this journey based on the seven rolls of film Smithson exposed that day.99 For the Artforum essay, Smithson selected six photographs that captured some of the mundane structures he encountered on his journey, among them The Bridge Monu­ ment, The Great Pipe Monument, and The Fountain Monument (Figure 4.14). The artist’s humorous designation of ordinary structures as works of art builds on the art-historical precedent of the readymade. As Philip Ursprung pointed out, the title Fountain Monument alludes to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917, the infamous read­ ymade consisting of a urinal. During the mid-1960s, the work of Duchamp (he was living in New York at the time) remained an important reference point for artists and critics in contextualizing contemporary avant-garde developments from neo-dada to pop and minimal art.100 Smithson, however, was critical of Duchamp’s work; in a 1973 interview he said that the elder artist was “trying to transcend production itself. . . . In other words, he takes an object out of the manufacturing process. . . . He has a certain contempt for the work process. He’s sort of playing the aristocrat.”101 Smithson then added that “the pose of priest-aristocrat that Duchamp takes on strikes me as reactionary.” His own ap­ proach, he asserted, “is more democratic. . . . I’m not a reductive artist, I’m a generative artist. There’s a vast network of interconnections that are established between all these different things, all these different aspects.”102 For Smithson, it was not a matter of iso­ lating Fountain Monument and positioning it as a rarefied object to be aestheticized but rather of making visible the multiple networks and larger social epistemologies around the object.103 Smithson was keen to expand art beyond a narrow formal-aesthetic trajectory into larger spatial and temporal frameworks. By employing photography, writing, and pub­ lishing, he was able to distribute The Monuments of Passaic across a wide geographical

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Figure 4.14 Robert Smithson, page from “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum, December 1967. Source: Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905–1987, bulk 1952–1987. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. © 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

region. At the time Artforum was printed in an edition of almost 11,000.104 Given that the magazine only cost $1.50, that it could be read at home, on the subway, or in the library, and that a copy often passed through the hands of numerous people, The Monu­ ments of Passaic was geared towards an audience outside the walls of museums, and far beyond New York City. And yet, however widely it was reproduced and disseminated, The Monuments of Passaic hardly resonated with a broad public. Artforum was (and is) a journal geared to an avant-garde readership, constituted of contemporary artists, crit­ ics, curators, and collectors of advanced art. Smithson’s elliptical prose, citations from disparate disciplinary sources, and ironic deliberations are frustrating even to a sympa­ thetic reader. Instead, The Monuments of Passaic has attracted an ardent following of theoretically oriented poststructuralists who esteem the work for its nuanced critique of

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Figure 4.15 Port Authority Bus Terminal, 41st Street in Manhattan, New York, NY, 1950. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Source: Photo Wurts Bros. Museum of the City of New York.

canonical master narratives.105 Scholars have thus positioned The Monuments of Passaic in stark opposition to traditional monuments and neglected how the work intersected with the contemporary practices of monumentalization, be it in the form of living memo­ rials, preservation efforts, or the designation of landmarks. Take, for example, the starting point of Smithson’s journey to Passaic: The Port Au­ thority Building (Figure 4.15). Completed in 1950 in the modernist style, the new bus ter­ minal was to consolidate the many different private terminals scattered across Midtown Manhattan. It became a major traffic hub that quickly reached its maximum capacity, and resulted in overflowing buses parked in the neighboring streets. Lewis Mumford, who in 1937 had argued against the viability of traditional memorials, compared the modernist terminal unfavorably with such monumental buildings as Grand Central Station and the George Washington Bridge. He opined that a major metropolitan terminal should convey “a feeling of exhilaration” but found that the exterior of the new bus terminal was dull and confused, the interior bleak, and the layout shortsighted. He concluded that the bus terminal was “neither audacious engineering nor imaginative architecture but merely a series of mediocre compromises in pursuit of short-term objectives.”106 The mediocrity of the Port Authority building thus sets the stage for Smithson’s exploration of ordinary and mundane monuments in Passaic, challenging us to look beyond the objects that the artist pictured and to unearth the meanings and values that are inscribed within the forms of both art and the built environment.

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Living Memorials

During the early twentieth century, a growing number of architects and planners came to abhor large figurative memorials because they were not only seen as traffic obstacles—as discussed above—but also as indulgent and wasteful. The architectural community pro­ posed the construction of what came to be known as “living memorials”: a functional structure—such as a community center, a library, or a bridge—built in memory of a his­ torically significant event or person. The adjective “living” implied that the monument served survivors instead of the dead. The practice is comparable to donating money for a social cause in honor of a deceased person rather than spending it on “useless” flowers to decorate their grave. Architectural historian Andrew Shanken has traced the emergence of living memorials to the period after World War I, when architects and planners conceived them as viable alternatives to the anticipated spate of war memorials. Such practical mon­ uments built for the benefit of the living corresponded with functionalist ideals in archi­ tecture and urban planning and continued to be a valued solution after World War II.107 Smithson’s nominal monuments cleverly intersect with the contemporary practice of designing living memorials. In The New Monuments and the End of Man, Robert Slifkin observed that living memorials “with their notable lack of figurative imagery, their spatial expansiveness, and their mundane banality,” may be understood “as ar­ chitectural analogues to the renaissance of the concept that took place within the ad­ vanced sculptural practice of the same period.”108 This insight highlights the formal and structural affinities between living memorials and avant-garde practices during the 1960s. The easy slippage between engineering structures, public monuments, and art­ works revealed and amplified their reciprocal meanings. In his art, however, Smithson did not simply take recourse to the practice of living memorials but critically reframed their implicit biases and hierarchies. In the United States the practice of combining monuments with functional structures coincided with the ever-growing demand for new infrastructure, public facilities, and housing. During the first half of the twentieth century, the living memorial tapped into the need to express the nation’s rising international status through monuments while heeding modernist dislike for wasteful, sculptural, grand designs associated with the beaux-arts tradition. Despite their dismay with traditional memorials, a number of mod­ ern architects argued that living memorials were unlikely to generate either remembrance or edification. In an article on war memorials, architect Philip Johnson quoted Eleanor Roosevelt’s words on her last night in the White House in April 1945: I have always looked at the Washington Monument out of my bedroom window. . . . That simple shaft, so tall and straight has often made me feel during the War that, if Washington could be steadfast through Valley Forge, we could be steadfast today in spite of anxiety and sorrow. Johnson then commented: It is hard to believe that Mrs. Roosevelt would be equally inspired by the George Washington Memorial Bridge. Driving across that bridge, she would be much more apt to concentrate on the traffic. . . . Calling a bridge a memorial does not make it one.109 In The Monuments of Passaic, Smithson seems to facetiously appropriate Johnson’s sense of humor to disprove him: He transformed a bridge into a monument with the

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Figure 4.16 Othmar Ammann and Cass Gilbert, George Washington Bridge, 1931. Photograph from New York City side by Arthur Rothstein, 1941. Source: Photograph courtesy Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Con­ gress, LC-USF346–024352-ZD. © Arthur Rothstein.

click of a shutter and an epistemological sleight of hand. The design of the Union Avenue Bridge over the Passaic River resembled the George Washington Bridge (Figure 4.16): both were skeleton structures with distinctive crisscross bracing. The latter, however, was a famous and admired engineering feat boasting the longest main span of any bridge in the world when it was completed in 1931. After his 1935 trip to the United States, Le Corbusier called it “the most beautiful bridge in the world,” and Judd mentioned it in his review of Twentieth Century Engineering (even though it was not included in the exhibition).110 By comparison, the Union Avenue Bridge featured in Smithson’s photograph was an insignificant and obscure counterpart. The pumping derrick and pipes, which Smithson named monuments, were even more ordinary. They were also temporary, installed as part of the construction of Route 21, known as the McCarter Highway, named in memory of Newark financier and philanthropist Uzal Haggerty McCarter. By transforming an insignificant bridge, a pumping derrick, and a set of pipes into monuments, Smithson’s practice playfully reverberated the practice of designing living memorials. The Monuments of Passaic came into existence not by physically constructing but by observing and photographing. Smithson took a picture of the Union Avenue Bridge, thereby separating the structure from its function and making it available for contempla­ tion. Viewers of the photograph were unable to walk or drive over the bridge; instead, the medium emphasized a visual and aesthetic engagement with the structure. In his

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essay, Smithson said the bridge itself was like an “over-exposed picture” and added that shooting it “with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph.”111 The act of looking—“casting a glance,” as Smithson later put it—transformed the bridge into a monument.112 The technique that produced the image simply made the process of looking materially evident. Photography functioned as a means of monumentalization. Shooting a picture re­ moves the subject, be it a person, structure, or landscape, from its historical and sociospatial situatedness. The photograph also arrests the subject at a specific moment in time, and the resulting picture eternalizes that moment. The mnemonic quality of photographs is central to the theory of photography as discussed, for example, in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, where the author contemplates a photograph of his deceased mother as a child.113 And, as Randall Mason has shown, historic photographs of buildings were piv­ otal sources for architectural restoration and the rise of the preservation movement dur­ ing the 1960s.114 This development points to the reciprocal relationship between visual imagery and material realization, in that one continuously affects the other. Photographs were not just records of the past; they served as guides for the restoration of historic buildings that was to take place in the future. The photographs that preservationists deemed most useful for this purpose depicted buildings in their original, pristine state, before natural forces and human wear and tear acted on the building. Smithson’s work, however, questions the existence of such an “original” state, be it in the form of visual representation or material reality. Rather humans have agency in choosing which state of a structure they value and thus take as a model for restoration, monumentalization, and the making of memory. Living memorials are not simply functional, but they express the reigning values of a society. Ruins in Reverse

In The Monuments of Passaic, Smithson introduced the concept of “ruins in reverse.” This initially might seem to correspond with preservationists’ efforts to restore dilapi­ dated buildings and return them to their original state. But Smithson understood the con­ cept more broadly, calling attention to structures’ ever-changing existence—their past, present, and future; their multiple temporal, material, metaphorical, and representational planes. After passing the construction zone along the Passaic River (deserted, since it was Saturday), Smithson observed: That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is—all the new con­ struction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built [emphases in the original].115 The ruin in reverse mirrored both past and future, undermining a linear, one-directional concept of time that had served as the basis for modern, Western notions of progress. In his multidirectional exploration of Passaic, Smithson rejected the nostalgic long­ ing for a lost past typical of the romantic ruin as well as an idealizing view of a better future pursued by modernist architects and planners and symbolized by living memori­ als. Many scholars thus have positioned the ruin in reverse as exemplifying Smithson’s entropic world view. Roberts, for example, wrote that “this paradoxical equation of progression and regression produces an enantiomorphic stoppage of historical motion”

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and concluded that Smithson’s work somewhat overeagerly anticipates “an entropic endtime, an eternal state of cosmic sameness.”116 Yet rather than emphasizing the pos­ thistorical stasis in which past and future cancel each other out, Smithson’s concept of the ruin in reverse enables us to see beyond these two opposing forces. The Monuments of Passaic models an expansive sociospatial and temporal framework, one that sees the present from the past, from the future, and from the geographical margins to bring it into sharper focus. The photographic reproductions that Smithson selected for “The Monuments of Pas­ saic” convey a multiplicity of differentiated views. During his said trip on September 30, 1967, he took about eighty photographs to then select six images to be reproduced in Artforum. Four of them were grouped into corresponding pairs and laid out in a grid on the page. Both the content and the arrangement of these photographic pairs correspond with Smithson’s practice of conjuring mirror images that expose, as Ann Reynolds has convincingly argued, the limitations of Western, stereoscopic models of perception.117 The first pair of photographs depicts the pumping derrick. The photo on the left shows the structure connected to a pipe floating on pontoons from a close distance, while the one on the right situates the pumping derrick in the background; the latter captures the scene at a wider angle, including the pipe along the riverbank that is connected to the derrick. The second pair of photographs provide two different perspectives on The Fountain Monu­ ment, one from an elevated position and the other from the side. These paired photographs convey how the objects change in relation to the moving observer. Still, two-dimensional photographs remain static and aloof from lived experience. Numerous other views exist between and beyond the chosen pair, as Smithson’s seven roles of exposed film testify.118 The Monuments of Passaic designates a shift in Smithson’s attention from New York City to the suburbs, from works of avant-garde art to minor functional structures framed as monuments. But the nominal monuments in Passaic are themselves material objects that frame a void. The pipes, pumping derrick, and pontoon were temporarily installed to reroute the Passaic River. In 1967 the river curved briefly westward in what was known as the Big Bend. The New Jersey Department of Transportation commissioned a major earthwork, hiring a construction company to dam the river, drain it, and excavate a straightened riverbed slightly to the east. The Passaic River was moved for the purpose of constructing the last section of Route 21, which linked Newark in the south with Pat­ erson Country to the north and was part of modernist planners’ long-standing endeavor to realize an extensive network of highways through and around New York City. The Monuments of Passaic thus not only draws attention to minor, insignificant structures but also to the larger epistemologies that frequently elude our sight. In “The Monuments of Passaic,” Smithson wittily gestured toward different models of interpretation associated with contemporary avant-garde practices. When discussing The Fountain Monument, he compared the water-spouting pipes to “six horizontal smoke­ stacks that seemed to be flooding the river with liquid smoke.”119 He then opined that “the great pipe was in some enigmatic way connected with the infernal fountain. It was as though the pipe was secretly sodomizing some hidden technological orifice, and causing a monstrous sexual organ (the fountain) to have an orgasm.”120 Here, Smithson extended his sly reference to Duchamp’s readymades and the sexual allusions found throughout the elder artist’s work—for example, in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass; 1915–23), a nine-foot-tall freestanding glass panel that depicts sexu­ alized mechanical tools and implements. Smithson concluded his interpretative forays, explaining, tongue firmly in cheek, that “a psychoanalyst might say that the landscape displayed ‘homosexual tendencies,’ but I  will not draw such a crass anthropomorphic

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conclusion. I will merely say, ‘It was there’.” Smithson slyly juxtaposes psychoanalyti­ cal, sexual allusions of mechanical forms with the literalist, minimalist mantra “It is what it is,” revealing the shortcomings of both. Among the images printed with Smithson’s essay is a map, a type of spatial represen­ tation that is assumed to translate three-dimensional space objectively and scientifically into two dimensions (Figure  4.17).122 Maps are diagrammatic drawings that abstract three-dimensional features of an area to provide viewers with a disembodied view of the land. Physical characteristics, be they natural or human-made, appear as lines and two-dimensional shapes. Titled Negative Map Showing Region of the Monuments along the Passaic River, the reproduced image is based on the maps the US Geological Survey produced for the entirety of the continental United States at a scale of 1:24,0000. Smith­ son selected twenty-eight contiguous quadrangles showing the area between Passaic and neighboring Carlstadt and from them created a photostatic print, a process that yielded a negative image.123 The letters that spell out names such as PASSAIC, WATTINGTON, and CARLSTADT appear in white against a black ground. Similarly, the Passaic River, along with traffic arteries, public buildings, homes, and the like register as white, blank regions or as voids. The last of the nominal monuments that Smithson discusses in his essay distills some of his main ideas. Titled The Sand-Box Monument (also called The Desert), it is a picture of a children’s sandbox in a public playground that looks like a minimalist readymade (Figure 4.18). In the photograph, we can barely see what is framed by the wooden casing. Smithson took the photo from a low vantage point and situated the foreshortened sand­ box in the upper third of the image, so that the surrounding area takes up the majority of 121

Figure 4.17 Robert Smithson, Negative Map Showing Region of the Monuments along the Passaic River, photostat used for “The Monuments of Passaic,” 1967. The National Museum, Norway. © 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

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Figure 4.18 Robert Smithson, The Sand-Box Monument (also called The Desert), photograph shot with an Instamatic 400, from “The Monuments of Passaic,” 1967. The National Museum, Norway. © 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

the picture plane. Indeed, the sand has spilled out beyond the box across the entire mid­ dle ground and foreground, thus defying any notion of the box as an impermeable con­ tainer or an autonomous work. The work’s alternate title, The Desert, takes us beyond the playground conjuring up a world of barren landforms. By employing different modes of representation, be it photography, maps, or writing, Smithson easily moved between objects and environments of vastly different scales and linked them visually, structurally, and metaphorically as part of an intricately entangled whole. The artist imbricated his own work within vast spatial and temporal scales. In the es­ say, Smithson asked readers to imagine the following event: A child runs clockwise inside the sandbox, which contains black sand on one side and white sand on the other. As the child proceeds, the black and white sand mix and slowly turn gray. When the child runs counterclockwise, the original division between black and white sand is not restored; rather, it will mix even more thoroughly, resulting in what Smithson called “an increase of entropy.”124 Smithson posited that if the event were filmed, one could play the film backward and restore the division of black and white sand. He concluded, however, that “sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost and enter the state of irreversibil­ ity.”125 This emphasis on material dissolution exemplifies Smithson’s concept of entropy. Visual records such as film, photographs, and maps are subject to the same laws of change and dissolution that characterize natural and human-made environments. While such en­ tropic dissolution may convey a dystopian worldview, it equally signifies the possibilities of rethinking the meanings of forms and materialities from an intersectional perspective: to see not just the construction of Highway 21 but its effects on natural ecosystems, to

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understand urban modernization from the positionality of the evicted, to shift attention from short-term economic gain to broader concepts of environmental justice. SoHo’s Preservation

Smithson continuously shifted perspectives between center and margin, between the void and the surrounding thus positioning their relationship as reciprocal rather than hierar­ chical.126 In “The Monuments of Passaic,” he stated that “Passaic seems full of ‘holes’ compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.”127 Manhattan was certainly more densely populated than the suburbs but both were full of holes. Indeed, the density of the city’s built environment made large excavation and modernization projects there more contentious. When Smith­ son journeyed to Passaic on September  30, 1967, LOMEX threatened to destroy the Manhattan neighborhoods of SoHo, Little Italy, and Chinatown. The new expressway— a monumental vacancy—was to ease the flow of traffic between the suburbs and the city center, in particular the redeveloped business district that boasted new, modernist steeland-glass towers such as One Chase Manhattan Plaza (1961) and the Marine Midland Building (1967), both designed by SOM’s Gordon Bunshaft. Residents of SoHo worked together with urban activists and progressive preserva­ tionists hoping to endow extant buildings with landmark status and thus protect their neighborhood from destruction. The areas affected by LOMEX, however, did not include major beaux-arts buildings that had spurred the rise of the preservation movement in New York City. In 1967 the Landmarks Preservation Commission deemed neither SoHo, Little Italy, nor Chinatown to have any particular architectural, aesthetic, or histori­ cal value. The preservation discourse in New York City, however, expanded during the second half of the 1960s. The commission started considering everyday buildings and structures, nominating multiple-block areas of private homes and eventually industrial structures to be registered as aesthetically and historically significant. Smithson took im­ petus from the practices of preservationists, who framed formerly functional buildings as valuable public monuments. His work reveals the epistemic power of such designations and how it shapes contemporary life. As Laurajane Smith emphasized in her scholarship, preservation was neither just about the past nor about material things but was “a process of engagement, an act of communication and an act of making meaning in and for the present.”128 Initially preservationists in New York City were keen to protect significant beaux-arts buildings that had been neglected, disparaged, and torn down as part of postwar urbani­ zation. The destruction of Pennsylvania Station in 1963, as noted previously, marked a turning point. A group of six young architects formed the Action Group for Better Archi­ tecture in New York and were joined by such prominent figures as Arthur Drexler, Jane Jacobs, Philip Johnson, Lewis Mumford, Paul Rudolph, and Aline Saarinen to protest the planned demolition of the station.129 These protests led to the formation of the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission in 1965. The commission soon began to assess the status of private historic homes. Greenwich Village, for example, featured a number of houses built in the Federal and Greek Revival style, which the commission designated as landmarks in 1966.130 Three years later, the entire neighborhood, a sixty-five-block area with about 2,000 structures, was nominated signaling the commission’s shift from a fo­ cus on historical styles to a broader appreciation of the built environment and the visual and material culture of lived spaces.131

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As early as 1965 urban activists and residents, among them many artists, appealed to the Landmarks Preservation Commission to protect SoHo from the wrecking ball.132 In contrast to Greenwich Village, which was historically associated with the domestic life of middle- and upper-class white Americans, SoHo originated as a commercial and industrial district. Constructed during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, most of the extant buildings in SoHo were erected for storing and trading wholesale dry goods be­ fore the neighborhood became known for its vibrant textile production. Preservationists and architects interested in vernacular structures sought to convey the worth of SoHo’s nineteenth-century industrial buildings, but the commission deemed the factories, lofts, communal spaces, and homes associated with working-class and immigrant populations unworthy of nomination. The visual and material culture of SoHo was outside of what Smith called “authorized heritage discourse.”133 Encompassing the monumental and aesthetic products representative of a dominant cultural group, authorized heritage dis­ course in New York City focused on architectural masterworks, be it major beaux-arts buildings or domestic architecture that symbolized and heroized the urban elite. The national discourse on architectural landmarks was already more broadminded than that of New York City. The National Historic Landmarks program, established un­ der the Historic Sites Act of 1935, honored buildings, locations, and landscapes not just according to standards of fine art but also owing to their historical, economic, and politi­ cal significance. In 1966 Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall approved the nomination of such diverse structures as the Woolworth Building in Manhattan (the world’s tallest building when it was completed in 1913), Well No. 4 at the Pico Canyon Oil Field (the birthplace of California’s petroleum industry), and the St. Mary’s Falls Canal (built by the Corps of Engineers between Lakes Superior and Huron) for the Register of National His­ toric Landmarks.134 The list of fifty-seven structures nominated that year also included Watkins Mill in Kansas City, which Donald Judd had compared favorably with his mini­ malist sculptures (see Chapter 3), and the Bingham Canyon Open Pit Copper Mine in Utah, for which Smithson would propose a reclamation project in the early 1970s. The Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York City soon followed suit, ex­ panding its remit to industrial structures and neighborhoods. In 1970 it reconsidered the aesthetic and historical value of SoHo. The nomination form elaborated on the sig­ nificance of the neighborhood’s role in the history of the Unites States as a modern in­ dustrial nation and pointed to the innovative cast-iron designs of many of its buildings (Figure 4.19). Rather than using brick as was typical for nineteenth-century factories or granite, which was used for the facades of grand public buildings such as Pennsylvania Station, designers explored new, cost-effective methods of construction. Iron proved an affordable, pliable, and strong material for decorative facades. New York architect and inventor James Bogardus was a major innovator of cast-iron building design, filing a patent for his invention in 1850.135 These facades were made at local factories, such as Daniel D. Badger’s Architectural Iron Works, and initially replicated classical designs featuring details such as the Corinthian, Dorian, or Ionic columns typical of more ex­ pensive stone buildings. Soon, however, local foundries showcased their own technical proficiency, creating features and patterns specifically suited for cast and wrought iron. SoHo’s history as an industrial center owes much to the textile production that domi­ nated the area starting in the 1880s. By the early twentieth century, however, technologi­ cal advances such as the invention of conveyer belts and electric looms changed garment production dramatically, making the tall, narrow buildings of SoHo obsolete for that purpose. Business owners soon moved from densely populated inner cities to suburban areas, where vacant lots were plentiful and property prices low, thus allowing them to

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Figure 4.19 Daniel D. Badger and John P. Gaynor, E. V. Haughwout & Company Building, 488– 492 Broadway, New York City, NY. Photograph by Cervin Robinson, 1970. Source: Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 1970. From Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, HABS NY-5459.

construct single-story factories that accommodated new workflows. This decentraliza­ tion was hastened by improved networks of freeways between cities and suburbs. The factories of SoHo had outlived their industrial purpose and were largely abandoned by the 1950s. They became available for low rents and offered ideal studio spaces for artists. Oldenburg, Mucha, Judd, Finch, Gordon Matta-Clark, and many others renovated and transformed industrial lofts into studios.136 Advocates argued that SoHo was worth saving from the wrecking ball not simply for its historical and architectural significance but also for economic reasons. What civic planners and real-estate agents dubbed as depressed or blighted actually provided af­ fordable living and working spaces for low-income groups. Jane Jacobs, in particular, was concerned more with the socioeconomic vitality of contemporary urban life than architectural styles. She railed against large-scale rationalist urban planning that Euro­ pean modernists including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Hilberseimer had promoted during the 1920s and 1930s and that American planners such as Robert Moses wholeheartedly embraced. Having observed the failures of modernist renewal projects in American cities, Jacobs understood the value of urban diversity. She supported mixeduse neighborhoods that integrated spaces for living, working, and leisure geared towards human interaction over modernist and monolithic government projects.

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Economics and aesthetics combined determined the fate of SoHo. Opponents of LOMEX formed an alliance, appearing at public hearings, staging protests, writing news­ paper op-eds, and filing for SoHo’s landmark status. With mayoral elections approach­ ing in the fall, plans for the construction of LOMEX were officially halted in July 1969, and Mayor Lindsay announced that “the road was dead ‘for all time’.”137 The following year, a new nomination form petitioning for SoHo’s landmark status was filed with the commission, and in 1973 a twenty-six-block area of largely nineteenth-century industrial buildings was so designated, making it the city’s first industrial district to be protected and preserved as a monument.138 Bestowing landmark status on a building or a neighborhood protected structures from material destruction, but it did not halt change. Rather, it often precipitated public and private interest in the renovation of the newly revalued structures and brought about gen­ trification. Preservationists sought to maintain the historic fabric of the city but also to make preservation economically viable. James Marston Fitch, who started the first grad­ uate program of historic preservation at Columbia University in 1964, advanced a model in which preservation was not just benevolent but viable from an economic standpoint and thus attractive to real-estate stakeholders.139 The concomitant processes of preserva­ tion and gentrification dramatically changed a neighborhood in that investors upgraded and modernized old structures and repurposed them for new uses. The cast-iron build­ ings of SoHo were preserved, restored, and repurposed; real estate values skyrocketed. Mixed-use developments included spaces for commerce, leisure, and loft living, remaking the neighborhood as a fashionable quarter that conformed to the dominant standards of the white affluent classes. The entangled forces of preservation and gentrification had detrimental effects on marginalized populations. Settled in older inner-city neighborhoods for their affordable rents, members of lower-income groups could neither afford to buy property nor partici­ pate in major renovation and preservation efforts nor pay rents inflated by gentrification. Upgrading neighborhoods mostly benefited those who were already privileged, while people of lower economic status were displaced. No less than the modernists, urban ac­ tivists and preservationists failed to acknowledge the deep-rooted structural inequalities that continued to precipitate environmental injustice, particularly along lines of race and class, thus contributing to the embourgeoisement of SoHo.140 One-dimensional notions of freedom, individuality, and progress ignored entrenched systems of oppression and inequality. The history of SoHo shows the impact of designating objects, buildings, and environ­ ments as monuments and the power of such nominal reframing to shape contemporary life. Keen to expand aesthetic discourse beyond a stylistic avant-garde trajectory, Smith­ son shifted attention to the ordinary built environment. In works such as The Monuments of Passaic, he not only looked beyond the world of art, but also closely entangled center and periphery, art and the built environment whereby these designations were constantly inverted. Recuperating equivalences between the visual, material, and conceptual forms of art and the everyday word reveals how art reflects and impacts lives. Ruins in Palenque

Smithson continued to upend the relationship between center and periphery, traveling beyond New York City and the United States to neighboring Mexico. In the spring of 1969 he took a two-week trip to the Yucatán Peninsula with his wife and artist Nancy

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Holt, and gallerist and collector Virginia Dwan, who had become a major sponsor of the artist’s work and a good friend. They traveled via plane from New York, stopping over in Florida for a few days before taking the second leg of their flight to Mérida. From there they drove southwest to Uxmal in a rental car, made their way to Campeche, then headed further south to the town of Palenque, where they visited the famous Maya ruins. Smithson took a series of photos using 35-mm slide film to capture various views of their hotel in Palenque. Three years later, invited to give a lecture at the University of Utah, he used the occasion to present the slides (Figure 4.20). In the early 1990s, two decades after Smithson’s untimely death in a plane crash, Holt recovered the slides and a recording of the forty-minute lecture and assembled them into an installation titled Hotel Palenque. The work was first exhibited in Robert Smithson: Photo Works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1993, where the recording played synchronously with the thirty-one consecutively projected slides.141 Subsequently, Holt published the transcript of the lecture along with reproductions of the photos in the 1995 issue of Parkett; and the Guggenheim Museum acquired the slides and recording for its collection in 1999.142 Like The Monuments of Passaic, Hotel Palenque involves a network of media, objects, and structures that defy conventional notions of a work of art. Smithson’s slide presentation did not feature any images of the Maya archeological site at Palenque, yet the relationship between the rather ordinary hotel and the nearby historic monument is central to this work. Smithson established this in his commentary accompanying the slides. Toward the beginning of the presentation, he projected an im­ age depicting a barren window frame closely resembling the shape of a 35-mm slide (no. 5/10).143 He said: Now here is one of the more interesting windows in the hotel. This looks out, I mean you really can’t see it. . . . But in that mist if you look through . . . if you could see actually back there you might remotely be able to pick out a fragment of the Palenque ruins. . . . My feeling is that this hotel is built with the same spirit that the Mayans built their temples.144 Smithson’s words delineate the intricate visual and conceptual relationships between the hotel’s architecture and the Maya ruins. The projected image not only draws attention to a neglected, unremarkable, everyday structure but also frames the nearby historic ruins in a new light. The relationship between Hotel Palenque and the Maya palace spans vastly different historical periods and as such continues Smithson’s quest to undermine a one-dimensional, linear progression of history; it also reveals larger spatial and geopolitical issues that link the United States, Mexico, and Indigenous cultures. Smithson, however, was himself im­ bricated within this transnational, transregional framework, traveling to the Yucatán as a tourist. Like many American middle- and upper-class travelers, he journeyed to Mexico for leisure and edification, visiting the historical site in Palenque, where Western arche­ ologists had rediscovered, excavated, and taken possession of Indigenous objects, struc­ tures, and histories. Tourists and archeologists alike were entangled within a politics of art and culture that instantiated white hegemony and claimed superiority over Mexicans and Native peoples.145 While Smithson’s work questioned the values of Western teleologi­ cal progress, he participated in othering peoples that lived in Palenque, positioning them as norm-defying and thus implicitly also perpetuating colonialist hierarchies.

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Figure 4.20 Robert Smithson, selected slides from Hotel Palenque, 1969/72. Slide projection of thirty-one 35-mm color slides (126 format) and audio recording of a lecture by the artist at the University of Utah in 1972 (42 min, 57 sec). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director’s Council and Executive Committee Members. © 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph courtesy Solo­ mon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 4.20 (Continued)

The first slide in Hotel Palenque shows an exterior view of the eponymous building, a simple rectangular structure (no. 1/10). The two-story brick hotel is seen beyond a wide dirt road that takes up almost half the picture. The capital lettering in red above its flat roof spells out the building’s name: HOTEL PALENQUE. A telephone pole stands to the right, and a bus is parked in front of the entrance on the left. Despite showing such an ordinary scene with a plain, boxlike building, Smithson promises anything but a straight­ forward experience. Narrating the first slide, he explained, This hotel is built in a kind of intertwining snaking way. It has no center, or you might try to find a center in this place but you really can’t, you know, because it’s so de-differentiated, and so the logic of the whole place is just impossible to fathom.146 In subsequent slides, Smithson presented a spatially complex structure, leading his audi­ ence through the hotel without a methodical plan. The tour moves from a hallway to

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Figure 4.21 Robert Smithson, Map of the Hotel Palenque, 1969. Ink on paper, 8 × 10 in. Holt/ Smithson Foundation. © 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

the first floor, over a suspension bridge, and into a courtyard after passing a tower; later we enter the lobby and then find ourselves on the roof. The tour creates the impres­ sion of a complicated building with multiple interconnected parts. Many of the slides provide partial or close-up views, so that any true spatial understanding of the hotel is impossible.147 Smithson sketched a floorplan of Hotel Palenque (Figure 4.21), but he didn’t include it in his slide lecture. Dated and signed April 1969—the month of his Yucatán trip—it is likely he made the drawing on site to gain an overview of the spatial layout of the hotel. The rooms, restaurant, and kitchen are grouped around a square courtyard, as we can easily make out. The hotel’s facade is aligned with the lower edge of the page and indi­ cated by the word ENTRANCE written in capital letters. The office is located just beyond the entrance facade. We can identify individual features, such as a dance hall at the top left of the layout and a bar adjacent to the right, followed by a dry pool with a suspen­ sion bridge. Floorplans are a means to grasp the spatial arrangement of a building from a disembodied, abstract point of view. The formal quality of the drawing—Smithson titled it Map of the Hotel Palenque—still communicates, however, the idea of a complex, in­ tricate building. Drawn in an individual, organic manner, the lines vary in thickness and expression and are retraced numerous times; different fonts intermingle with words writ­ ten in cursive and others in block letters. Like Smithson’s lecture, the rough hand-drawn plan formally conveys the idea of a complex, unfinished structure.

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Indeed, the slide presentation resonates with the concept of the “ruin in reverse” that Smithson had introduced in The Monuments of Passaic. Construction, renovation, dete­ rioration, and demolition seem to take place simultaneously and sometimes are hard to distinguish from each other. In one of the slides we see the remnants of ceilings, evidence of a previously existing portion of the building that has fallen or been knocked down; shards of masonry and lengths of rebar might as well indicate the beginning of a new building project (no. 3/10). In a later slide, Smithson captures the wet floor of the hotel’s upper level, looking as though the concrete had just been poured (no. 9/10). A row of rebar skeletons along its left edge indicates columns that await casting, but it is unclear if the process will continue—no materials or tools that would ensure the project’s com­ pletion are in sight. Addressing the state of the hotel in his lecture, Smithson remarked: “It’s not often that you see buildings being both ripped down and built up at the same time.”148 Smithson also drew attention to features whose functions had changed or defied ex­ pectations. The hotel’s large swimming pool, for example, did not contain water but was populated by weeds and, as the artist commented, became “a kind of pen for iguanas scampering all around” (no. 6/10).149 Other slides depicted freestanding pillars that once likely supported a roof, or at least were intended for such a function (no. 4/10). Smithson said, “There you can see those pillars again. I mean, it’s hard to say but they might be pylons for torches or something of that sort, which might be quite nice.”150 Contemplat­ ing the rooms behind the pillars, he stated: “I mean you never know when you might have some traveler, some tourist who comes to the hotel and wants a place that doesn’t have a roof on it.”151 The artist’s eccentric, ironic explanations appeared throughout the lecture, but he in­ toned them with the scholarly seriousness of an archeologist having made a ground­ breaking discovery. The audience attending the event—mostly students and faculty from the University of Utah’s Department of Architecture where Smithson was a visiting professor—may have expected a presentation if not about historic Maya ruins then at least about the artist’s own work and thus must have been utterly confounded. About five minutes into the lecture a few listeners responded with hesitant chuckles, and soon thereafter Smithson’s comments were met with outright laughter. The artist, nevertheless, continued his sober, scientific-seeming, measured articulation, thus exposing our precon­ ceptions about architecture, its function, value, and meaning. Presenting a slide lecture on Palenque that did not show a single photograph of the historic Maya ruins but rather focused on an ordinary Mexican hotel, inverted the normative hierarchy between them. Philip Ursprung lucidly described the humor weaving through Hotel Palenque. In its hybridity between “academic lecture and homely slide evening,” the presentation cri­ tiqued existing conventions of the artist’s lecture and, Ursprung argued, the growing preeminence of conceptual art in American avant-garde discourse. By using the term “de-architecturization,” Smithson not just deconstructed the whole to understand its underlying system but “rather cast doubt on the coherence of the whole.”152 Timothy Martin further explored this line of thought, comparing the artist’s irrational and eclectic portrayal of the hotel to the human unconscious.153 Entering the hotel with Smithson is like exploring the many unknown paths, unopened doors, or half-constructed stairs within our psyche. Martin’s reading emphasized the subjectivity of the viewer so central to the poststructural critique of a universal, objective experience. Poststructuralists’ focus on subjective experience, however, also led to relativism and a withdrawal from social and political activism. Subsequent scholars of feminist, queer, and decolonial theory have

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Figure 4.22 The Palace at Palenque, Mexico, dating back to the fifth century CE. The northern half and tower date to about 721 CE. Source: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

pointed out that the individual remained male, heterosexual, cisgender, and white by default; they also reintroduced the social urgency of radical subjectivities. These insights point away from an inward focus and toward a public notion of de-architecturization. By analyzing Hotel Palenque in equivalence to the Maya palace, Smithson’s eclectic and subjective narrative becomes a means to address broader sociopolitical issues. The formal slippages and associations between contemporary hotel and archeological ruin reveal systems of injustice, subjugation, and colonialization. Smithson’s framing of Hotel Palenque as a spatially complex and entangled building—even if tongue in cheek—mirrors scholarly descriptions of the Maya archeo­ logical site nearby, particularly the palace, one of the major extant structures and a focal point of archeological investigations at the time (Figure 4.22). The palace at Palenque consisted of numerous houses, vaulted rooms, and long hallways built around three inte­ rior courtyards and a prominent tower. They formed a unit, sitting together on a large, el­ evated platform built atop a lower level with passageways and chambers, some of which were reached by staircases from above. Throughout the large and intricately arranged palace, archeologists found blocked doorways and inaccessible stairs, contributing to the mazelike perception of the entire structure.154 In his important survey The Art and Ar­ chitecture of Ancient America (1962), George Kubler described the palace at Palenque as “the most complex edifice of mid-Classic date in the entire Maya world.”155 His colleague

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Michael Coe echoed that description, calling it a “veritable labyrinth.” Smithson was familiar with the books of both scholars. He had used an image from Kubler’s book for his essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” published in the September 1969 issue of Artforum, and he owned the 1967 edition of Coe’s volume.157 The palace had changed over numerous centuries, being regularly remodeled and re­ built. Its lower level consisted of structures dating as far back as the fifth century CE. These were subsequently incorporated into the platform supporting numerous buildings erected under Palenque’s king K’inich Janab Pakal (r. 615–83). Pakal’s successors contin­ ued to add new structures, such as the four-story tower, and modified existing ones on the main and subterranean levels. Functions as well as materials and layout changed over time. During the seventh and eighth centuries, the palace served as the administrative and ceremonial seat where the king ruled and was crowned. According to archeologists of the 1960s, the king’s enemies were punished in the courtyards, priests lived in the subterranean area, and the tower served as an astronomical observatory.158 Scholarly in­ terpretations have evolved over time, too. Called a palace by early explorers to denote the residence of a king, archeologists today have evidence that the kings lived in a different structure. The purpose of the various buildings is still debated, and indeed, they may have had multiple functions. The tower, for example, was likely used as both an astronomical observatory and a defensive lookout.159 Palenque was sacked numerous times by the neighboring realm of Toniná during the seventh century, the population fell significantly, and the city was slowly abandoned. Architecture was overtaken by vegetation; stones eroded, walls crumbled, and doorways became inaccessible. Known to early sixteenth-century settlers in the area, archeologi­ cal explorations of Palenque made headway during the late eighteenth century. Various expeditions started clearing the site, only for it to be reclaimed by flora and fauna before the next foray. A series of three major expeditions took place between 1784 and 1787, followed by another one twenty years later. In the mid-nineteenth century John Lloyd Stephens, a US-American explorer and political ambassador, led two major explorations of Mesoamerican sites. He was accompanied by the English architect and draftsman Frederick Catherwood, who made drawings of artifacts, architectural remains, and the sites they visited. His drawings were reproduced in Stephens’s publications such as the magisterial two-volume Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843).160 The former included a floorplan of the palace at Palenque, in which Catherwood delineated the arrangement of the various spaces (Figure 4.23). He labeled the plan in fine script, coloring intact walls black and tinting those that had been restored or were still in ruin in a lighter shade. His impeccable craftsmanship and precision convey the explorers’ scientific endeavor. Stephens, Catherwood, and other American and European archeologists, architects, artists, and cultural ambassadors saw themselves as possessing a unique historical con­ sciousness: exceptional, superior. Supported by their respective imperialist governments, they invested energy, time, and resources in recovering the Maya ruins in Palenque.161 They excavated ancient structures and unearthed artifacts and human remains with the aim of studying the past of Indigenous peoples. By following enlightened scientific prin­ ciples, they claimed the superiority of their methods that were implicated in a colonial­ ist geography of physical, economic, and epistemic violence. Like European explorers who claimed to have discovered the Americas, who decimated and destroyed Indigenous populations, archeologists claimed a stake in American Indian sites and took possession of cultural artifacts and antiquities, interpreting objects, buildings, and histories from a 156

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Figure 4.23 Frederick Catherwood, floorplan of the Maya Palace, Palenque, Mexico. Reproduced in John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yu­ catan, volume 2, 1841. Source: Courtesy of HathiTrust.

Western scientific perspective. They projected an image of white supremacy that propa­ gated hegemonic forms of knowledge production. Smithson knew the work of Stephens and Catherwood, referencing their publications in the title of his Artforum essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.”162 He was also familiar with the looted Maya sculptures at the American Museum of Natural His­ tory in New York City, a place he had visited as a boy with his parents and continued to frequent after he moved to Manhattan.163 Stephens had expropriated hundreds of Maya sculptures and architectural remnants during his travels, taking them back to the United States. He showcased them in the Broadway Panorama in New York City, an entertain­ ment venue that Catherwood had designed to exhibit panoramic paintings, but they were lost when the building was destroyed by fire in 1842. A small group of objects was still to arrive by steamboat; they were acquired by the American Museum of Natural History during the early twentieth century and showcased as part of its collection of Mexican and Central American antiquities.164 Smithson questioned archeology’s supposedly enlightened aim of uncovering an objec­ tive history, but nevertheless found inspiration in the discipline’s processes. The activ­ ity of excavating inverted the common understanding of building. Rather than adding material to erect a structure, archeologists focused on removing dirt, unearthing extant foundations, cleaning and examining masonry before reconstructing segments of walls and staircases from the recovered material. Archeologists valued ancient artefacts and

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structures as a means to learn and thereby also colonize and subjugate Indigenous civi­ lizations. They looted and then classified the visual, material, and aesthetic products of Mesoamerican tribes to display them in collections of natural history museums, removing them from the lived experiences of a people. In Hotel Palenque, Smithson appropriated the formal, visual, and material descriptions of the Maya palace to imbue a contempo­ rary functional structure with new possibilities of meaning. He effectively monumen­ talized the hotel and positioned it as an eccentric alternative to deeply flawed Western notions of progress. At the same time, he othered Mexican and Indigenous populations, portraying them as passive and devoid of agency. He implicitly portrayed them as ac­ cepting squalid conditions and poverty, denying their aspirations for actively shaping their lives and engaging with the built and natural environments. As an American tourist visiting Palenque, Smithson could play the role of the critical, sly observer. He did not live in Palenque or have to cater to tourists for his livelihood. He had a studio in Green­ wich Village, a neighborhood in the center of New York City where property values were booming. As a white middle-class American, he had the means to own property and was a beneficiary of modernization. When Smithson presented the slides of Hotel Palenque during his time as visiting professor at the University of Utah, he and Holt started to pursue land-reclamation projects. In these endeavors, they not only visually and conceptually reframed ordi­ nary, marginalized, or exploited environments but also sought to collaborate with large industrial companies to physically and materially work in and with specific sites. Of particular interest during his trip to Utah was the Bingham Canyon Open Pit Cop­ per Mine, located sixteen miles south of Salt Lake City in the Oquirrh mountains. In 1964, the mine had featured in MoMA’s Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition as a prominent example of earthworks. Two years later, it was nominated—as men­ tioned earlier— for the Register of National Historic Landmarks, a designation that Kennecott Copper Corporation, the owner of the mine, officially accepted in 1972. In the unsolicited proposal that Smithson sent to Kennecott in early 1973, he suggested to transform the mine into an enormous public work of art. He envisioned construct­ ing a revolving platform at the base of the pit with four crescent earth forms. Visitors were to walk onto the platform and from there experience the enormity of the manmade hole as its form was slowly disintegrating, being reclaimed by nature.165 While not realized, Smithson’s ideas and his work more generally reframed and upended conceptions of the built and natural environment, imbuing art with new meanings and possibilities. Claes Oldenburg for his part also set out to realize his imagined ideas in the real world. In May 1969—Smithson, Holt, and Dwan had just returned from their Mexican sojourn—he installed his first large-scale public monument. Entitled Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, the work was commissioned by a group of architecture students and alumni at Yale University, who were intrigued by the radical sociopolitical poten­ tial and the challenge of realizing the artist’s fantastical proposals. Oldenburg designed a twenty-foot-tall lipstick with an inflatable tip perched on a tank chassis. The instal­ lation of Lipstick (Ascending) at the university’s Beinecke Plaza unfolded not without technical difficulties: After being pumped up, the lipstick tip failed to remain inflated; the balloon inside the vinyl lining was too small and leaked air, and the form drooped over the aluminum shaft. The tip was replaced with a rigid material, but the wooden chas­ sis deteriorated over the ensuing months and Oldenburg decided to remove the work in early 1970. Four years later the work was recreated in weathering steel and fiberglass to

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ensure its durability; it was installed at the university’s Morse College.166 Subsequently, Oldenburg and his second wife Coosje van Bruggen worked with architects, engineers, planners, and city administrators to realize many more colossal monuments. Ideas and concepts explored in art became reality, but in the process, they also lost some of their radical, avant-garde propositions. Notes 1. Claes Oldenburg, interview with Paul Carroll, August 22, 1968, published as “The Poetry of Scale,” in Claes Oldenburg: Proposals for Monuments and Buildings, 1965–1969 (Chicago: Big Table Publishing Company, 1969), 13. See also Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 104. 2. Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 1–2. See also Suzaan Boettger, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023). 3. For earth artists’ interest not just in the untainted spaces of the American wilderness but cul­ tural and urban environments, see Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, “Ends of the Earth and Back,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, exh. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and House der Kunst, Munich (Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2012), 17–31. For discussions of the ethical aspects of land art from a phenomenological perspective, see Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 4. For a historical overview of traditional monuments, see the first part of the entry “Monu­ ments” by Marita Sturken, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3: 272–276. 5. Oldenburg, “Poetry of Scale,” 13. 6. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Artnews 57, no. 6 (October 1958), 56–57. 7. Achim Hochdörfer, “From Street to Store: Claes Oldenburg’s Pop Expressionism,” in Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, ed. Achim Hochdörfer with Barbara Schröder, exh. cat. Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Munich: Del Monico Books, Prestel, 2012), 12–63; and Cécile Whiting, “Oldenburg’s Store,” in Claes Oldenburg, ed. Nadja Rottner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 107–116. For a contemporary source, see Jill Johnston, “Claes Olden­ burg,” Art News 61, no. 7 (November 1962): 13. 8. Katherine Smith, The Accidental Possibilities of the City: Claes Oldenburg’s Urbanism in Post­ war America (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021), 3. 9. Smith, Accidental Possibilities of the City, 33. See also Katherine Smith, “The Public Posi­ tions of Claes Oldenburg’s Objects in the 1960s,” Public Art Dialogue 1, no. 1 (March 2011): 25–52. 10. Oldenburg, “Poetry of Scale,” 13. 11. Edward C. Burks, “ ‘Rust Bucket’ Fleet Is Criticized,” The New York Times, May 23, 1966, 63. Forty ships from the Hudson River Fleet were eventually activated for the Vietnam War. See Scott Webber, “The Hudson River National Defense Reserve Fleet,” South of the Mountains 16, no. 2 (April–June 1972): 8–10. 12. Monuments are typically defined by their large size, particularly when focusing on their public role as part of the built environment. More broadly the term “monument” may denote objects or events of great importance. The word “memorial” is often used synonymously but places more emphasis on the act of remembering and less on public meaning and scale. Young ad­ dressed the interchangeable definition of the two terms in James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 3–4. See also Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: ‘Les Lieux de Mémoire’,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24; and Erica Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 17–60. 13. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. from the 13th French ed., with an introduc­ tion by Frederick Etchells (New York, Payson & Clarke, ltd., 1927); for the original French version, see Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris: G. Crès, 1923). 14. Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25, trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo (Fall 1982): 21–51; for the original German

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version, see Alois Riegl, Der Moderne Denkmalskultus: Sein Wesen und Seine Entstehung (Vi­ enna: W. Braumüller, 1903). See also Lucia Allais and Andrei Pop, “Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations,” Grey Room 80 (Summer 2020): 6–25; and Lucia Allais, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monument in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 15. Webber, “The Hudson River National Defense Reserve Fleet,” 8–10. 16. Claes Oldenburg, tape-recorded interview with Paul Cummings, 1973–1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, transcript, 29–62; Maartje Olden­ burg, “Chronology,” in Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, 280. On the influence of the Chicago Bauhaus, see Nadja Rottner, “Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse: Performing a Cinema without Film,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (March 2012): 11. 17. Jo Applin, “ ‘Strange Encounters’: Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Colossal Monuments for New York and London,” Art History 34, no. 4 (September 2011): 845. 18. Claes Oldenburg, tape-recorded interview with Paul Cummings, 1973–1974, 83 (Decem­ ber 13, 1973). 19. Claes Oldenburg, “Fotodeath,” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 84–93; and Claes Oldenburg, Injun & Other Histories, 1960 (New York: A Great Bear Pamphlet, 1966). 20. For the history of Ellis Island, see Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975); and Barbara Blumberg, Celebrating the Immigrant: An Administrative History of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, 1952– 1982 (Boston: Division of Cultural Resources, North Atlantic Regional Office, National Park Service, 1985). 21. The most significant law restricting immigration in the early twentieth century was the JohnsonReed Act, generally referred to as the Immigration Act of 1924. For the history leading up to the 1924 law, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 22. Wall Street Journal, September 18, 1956, 20; also quoted in Blumberg, Celebrating the Immi­ grant, 96. See also Victor H. Lawnthe, “Ellis Island Will Be Sold at Auction: U. S. Selling Haven of Migration Days for Private Use,” The New York Times, September 14, 1956, 1, 8. 23. The proposals for Ellis Island’s development by commercial firms all involved the destruction of the existing buildings. One of the grandest plans was put forward by the Damon Doudt Corpo­ ration for a business center and hotel with a futuristic design prepared by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Group. See Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1995), 1134–1136. 24. Joseph B. Rose, “Landmarks Preservation in New York,” Public Interest 74 (Winter 1984): 132–145. For a history leading up to the 1965 passing of the landmarks law, see Anthony Wood, Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks (New York: Routledge, 2007). 25. Eric WM. Allison, “Historic Preservation in a Development-Dominated City: The Passage of New York City’s Landmark Preservation Legislation,” Journal of Urban History 22, no. 3 (March 1996): 350–376. 26. The essay was commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League; excerpts were published in The New York Times Magazine, August 4, 1963, 6–7, 56. A revised version, which had not been finalized when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, was published posthumously as John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (New York: Harpers and Row, 1964). While not an immigrant himself, Kennedy represented a religious minority: he was the first Catholic presi­ dent of the United States. For the changes in immigration politics as part of the Hart-Cellar Act, see David M. Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Gabriel Chin, “The Civil Rights Revolution Comes to Immigration Law: A New Look at the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,” North Carolina Law Review 75 (November  1996): 273–345; Erika Lee, “American Gatekeeping: Race and Immigration Law in the Twentieth Century,” in Not Just Black and White: Histori­ cal and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, ed. Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 119–144; and Jia Lynn Yang, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over Ameri­ can Immigration, 1924–1965 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020).

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27. Johnson quoted in Blumberg, Celebrating the Immigrant, 103. The dedication ceremony and signing of the proclamation took place in the White House Rose Garden on May 11, 1965. 28. The group exhibition titled Recent Work was on view May 5–31, 1965. It featured eight draw­ ings of Oldenburg’s colossal monuments. His early text proposal Monument to Immigration is first mentioned in published form in January 1968 as part of an article written by Dan Graham. See Graham, “Oldenburg’s Monuments,” Artforum 6, no. 5 (January 1968): 30–37. 29. See the accompanying exhibition catalog New Work by Oldenburg (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1966); and cat. nos. 230 and 231 in Gene Baro, Claes Oldenburg: Drawings and Prints (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1969), 257. 30. Jo Applin, “Strange Encounters,” 852. 31. Smith, Accidental Possibilities of the City, 1–8, 105–145. 32. Oldenburg, “Poetry of Scale,” 15; see also the artist’s comments in Claes Oldenburg: Skulp­ turer Och Teckningar (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1966), n.p. 33. Julian Rose, “Objects in the Cluttered Field: Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monuments,” Octo­ ber 140 (Spring 2012): 119. 34. Barbara Haskell, Claes Oldenburg: Object into Monument (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Mu­ seum, 1971), 52, and Oldenburg: Proposals for Monuments, 162. 35. Oldenburg, “Poetry of Scale” 36. 36. In Germany a Frankfurter is a smoked sausage from the region around Frankfurt distinct from other sausages and is not served in a bun. 37. For a discussion of Oldenburg’s work in the context of new criticism, see Nadja Rottner, “Ob­ ject Lessons,” in Claes Oldenburg, October Files 13, ed. Nadja Rottner (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: 2012), 200. 38. Oldenburg created two slightly different drawings that represent this monument. See cat. nos. 215 and 232 in Baro, Oldenburg: Drawings and Prints, 255, 257. For a description of this proposal, see Oldenburg: Skulpturer Och Teckningar, n.p. 39. Oldenburg, “Poetry of Scale,” 11. For exploring Oldenburg’s morphological approach to form finding, see Nadja Rottner, “Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Three-Way Plug and the Issue of Projective Vision,” Infinite Mile 27 (April 2016): 1–21; www.infinitemiledetroit.com/Claes_Oldenburgs_ Giant_Three-Way_Plug_and_the_Issue_of_Projective_Vision.html [accessed July 28, 2018]. 40. Joseph C. Ingraham, “Barnes Plans New Traffic Flow from Canal Street to Battery,” The New York Times, February 28, 1962, 1; and “Broadway to Add One-Way Section: Runs from Canal to 14th St.,” The New York Times, April 8, 1963, 24. 41. Oldenburg in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 17. See also Charalampos Politakis, Architectural Colossi and the Human Body: Buildings and Metaphors (London: Routledge, 2018), 64. 42. Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s iconic Plan of Chicago of 1909, for example, made ex­ tensive use of traditional monuments. See the chapter “The City of Monuments” in Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 3rd ed. (London: Blackwell, 2002), 188–217. 43. Philip C. Johnson, “War Memorials: What Aesthetic Price Glory?” Art News 44, no. 11 (Sep­ tember  1945): 9; Lewis Mumford, “The Death of the Monument” in Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, eds. James L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 263–270. 44. Percival Goodman, “Real War Memorials,” New York Herald Tribune, May 17, 1944, 18. 45. Oldenburg, “Poetry of Scale,” 25. 46. Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 195–248. 47. The World War II memorial in Washington, DC, which was dedicated in 2004, diminishes this impact by displaying 4,048 stars on its Freedom Wall, each of which stands for 100 Americans who died in the war. See Savage, Monument Wars, 297–306. 48. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transfor­ mation of New York (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 213; and Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974). 49. Charles R. Simpson, SoHo: The Artist in the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 50. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). See also Peter Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).

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51. Charles G. Bennett, “Wagner Opposes Moses and Barnes over Expressway,” The New York Times, April 12, 1963, 56. 52. SOM: Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1950–1962 (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2009). 53. Ninety percent of LOMEX’s costs were to be paid from federal sources and 10 percent from state sources, with less than half a percent remaining for the city. See Joseph Lelyveld, “Deci­ sion Pending on Expressway,” The New York Times, January 24, 1965. 54. Clayton Knowles, “Wagner Orders Building of Manhattan Expressway,” T he New York Times, May 26, 1965, 1. 55. Knowles, “Wagner Orders Building of Manhattan Expressway,” 1, 35. 56. The students Evans, O’Brien, and Schwartz prepared the study as part of a class assignment. They consulted with faculty at Cornell’s geology department on the estimated depth of the bedrock. Excerpts of their study are published in Oldenburg: Skulpturer Och Teckningar, n.p. 57. Pierre Restany, “Claes Oldenburg 1965 e i disegni di ‘Monumenti Giganti’ per New York,” Domus 433 (December 1965): 50–54. The drawing Colossal Monument for New York: Teddy Bear, Central Park (1965) is reproduced as part of the article. For the cover proposals, see cat. nos. 227–229, in Baro, Oldenburg: Drawings and Prints, 256–257. 58. Alfons Schilling, “Bau im Gespräch mit Claes Oldenburg,” Bau 21, no. 4 (1966): 83–87. 59. Oldenburg, “Poetry of Scale,” 25, 26. In 1967, two of Oldenburg’s monument drawings and an artist’s statement appeared in the Yale architectural magazine Perspecta alongside works and statements by Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin. See “4 Sculptors,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 11 (1967): 44–53. The initial titles of Oldenburg’s early monu­ ment drawings did not include the word “proposed.” The work discussed previously, for ex­ ample, was first titled Colossal Monument of Concrete Inscribed with Names of War Heroes. The titles of the drawings were systematized as part of the catalogue raisonné section in the 1969 publication Baro, Oldenburg: Drawings and Prints. See also Herbert Marcuse, “Com­ menting on Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monuments for New York City,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 12 (1969): 75–76. On Oldenburg’s and Coosje van Bruggen’s collabora­ tions with architects, see Smith, Accidental Possibilities of the City, 147–238; and Katherine Smith, “A  Symbolic Situation: Claes Oldenburg and Robert Venturi at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College,” Archives of American Art Journal 48, no. 1/2 (Spring 2009): 46–55. 60. On histories of public sculpture in New York, see Michele H. Bogart, Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York City (London: Reaktion Books, 2018); Michele H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 (Washington DC: Smithso­ nian Institution Scholarly Press, 1997); and Michele H. Bogart, The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 61. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 60–62; Claes Old­ enburg, “Sunday, October  1, 1967,” in Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side, eds. Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg, and Barbara Schröder (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 251; Grace Glueck, “Art Notes,” The New York Times, October  15, 1967, 22. For the exhibition Sculpture in Environment and Oldenburg’s contribution, see the comprehensive discussion in Smith, Accidental Possibilities of the City, 105–145; and Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties 1–8. For Oldenburg’s rejected proposals, see Robert E. Haywood, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg: Art, Happenings, and Cultural Politics, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 158–159. 62. For a realized “obstacle” monument that was highly controversial, see Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc installed at Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza in 1981 and removed in 1989. See Rosa­ lyn Deutsche, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy,” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 257–268; Clara Wyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk, The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); and Richard Serra, “Art and Censorship,” in Ethics and the Visual Arts, eds. Elaine King and Gail Levin (New York: Allworth Press, 2006), 185–194. 63. The exchange is narrated in Robert E. Dallos, “Sculpture Stirs Interest, Sight Unseen,” The New York Times, October 2, 1967, 55. See also Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Old­ enburg: Object into Monument, 61. 64. Dallos, “Sculpture Stirs Interest,” 55.

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65. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 61. Oldenburg also took photographs and made a ten-minute Super 8 film entitled Hole. See Smith, Accidental Possibilities of the City, 141–144. 66. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 61. 67. Initially the work was to be done by horticultural workers employed by the Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 60. 68. Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape, 19–21; and Haywood, Kaprow and Oldenburg, 157–162. See also Claes Oldenburg, “America: War & Sex, Etc.,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 8 (Summer 1967): cover, 32–38, reprinted in Oldenburg: Writing on the Side, 285–293. 69. Robert Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 120–130; and Young, The Texture of Memory, 17–48. Young expanded this term to describe the more general transformation of monuments during the twentieth century; see second part of the entry James E. Young, “Monuments,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 3: 276–278. See also Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialization of Public Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); and Mechtild Widrich, Monu­ mental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023). 70. One of the most famous and often copied cenotaphs was built after the design of Edwin Lu­ tyens at London’s Whitehall, the major street leading south from Trafalgar Square. London also boasts an Egyptian obelisk, which forms a pair with Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park. Both date to about 1450 BCE, have comparable inscriptions, and originally stood in the Egyp­ tian city of Heliopolis. In London, the obelisk was erected at the Embankment just a short distance east of Trafalgar Square. Oldenburg visited London in 1966, taking the opportunity to explore the city’s monuments that inspired a number of his subsequent proposals. 71. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 61. 72. The Oldenburgs used foam rubber, kapok, and cardboard to stuff the soft sculptures. 73. Graham, “Oldenburg’s Monuments,” 30–37; Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 10 (September 1964): 36; reprinted in Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975, ed. Kasper Koenig (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and New York: New York University Press, 1975), 133. 74. David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Ha­ ven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 1–19. See also Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press: 2006); and Susanneh Bieber, “Technology, Engineering, and Feminism: The Hidden Depths of Judy Chicago’s Minimal Art,” Art Journal 80, no. 21 (Spring 2021): 106–123. 75. Patty Mucha, “Soft Sculpture Sunshine,” in Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists: 1958– 1968, eds. Sid Sachs and Kalliopi Minioudaki (University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and Abbev­ ille Press, 2010), 44–158. More recent scholarship has included Mucha as part of the narrative, while the artworks themselves remain largely attributed to Claes Oldenburg. 76. Peter Kihss, “Downtown Tunnel Studied Instead of an Expressway,” The New York Times, January 17, 1967, 1, 26. 77. “Lower Manhattan Tunnel,” editorial, The New York Times, January 18, 1967. 78. Clayton Knowles, “New Plans Prepared for Downtown Expressway,” The New York Times, March 28, 1967, 1, 41. 79. Ronald Maiorana, “Lindsay Lists Details of Cross-Town Road Plan,” The New York Times, October 3, 1967. The new numbers denoted buildings rather than the multiple families and businesses living in each one of them. Thus the reduction is not as significant as it first might seem. 80. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 60. 81. Twentieth Century Engineering, plates  103–105, 133–139. Oldenburg was in Europe from May to November 1964, so he did not see the exhibition when installed at MoMA. 82. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 61. 83. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 61. 84. Oldenburg, “Hole (1967),” in Haskell, Oldenburg: Object into Monument, 61. 85. Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967): 48–51, reprinted as “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1996), 68–74.

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86. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 72. 87. Smithson, “Some Void Thoughts on Museums,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 4 (February 1967): 41–42, reprinted in Smithson: Collected Writings, 41–42. 88. Smithson in “What is a Museum? A Dialogue Between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson,” in Arts Yearbook 9 (1967): 94–101, reprinted Smithson: Collected Writings, 44. 89. Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October 10 (Autumn 1979): 120–130; Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” in October 12 (Spring, 1980), 67– 86; and Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (Part 2),” in October 13 (Summer, 1980), 58–80; see also the chapter “Printed Matter: A Heap of Language,” in Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), 153–190. 90. Jennifer L. Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 2004). See also Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 100–121, where the author pays close attention to morphological equivalences at work in Smithson’s practices, in particular using Smithson’s personal archive as a source. 91. Roberts, Mirror-Travels, 64. 92. Roberts, Mirror-Travels, 85. 93. See Eugenie Tsai, “Robert Smithson: Plotting a Line from Passaic, New Jersey, to Amarillo, Texas,” in Robert Smithson, eds. Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler (Los Angeles: The Mu­ seum of Contemporary Art, and Berkeley: University of California Press 2004), 1–31. 94. Judd, introduction, in Complete Writings, VII. 95. Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd,” in 7 Sculptors (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1965), 13–17; reprinted in Smithson: Collected Writings, 4–6. 96. Alena Williams, ed., Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 97. Robert Smithson, “Crystal Land,” Harper’s Bazaar (May 1966), reprinted in Smithson: Col­ lected Writings, 7–9; and Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Artforum 4, no. 10 (June 1966): 26–31, reprinted in Smithson: Collected Writings, 10–23. 98. The friendship between Judd and Smithson disintegrated during this time, indicating their di­ verging interests and pursuits. In early 1967 Judd published a laconic statement in Arts Maga­ zine: “Smithson isn’t my spokesman.” See Don Judd, “Letter to the editors,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 4 (February 1967): 8. On the impact of Judd’s writing, see also Mel Bochner, untitled essay, in The Writings of Donald Judd: A Chinati Foundation Symposium, 13–25; reprinted as “Judd’s Writing and Influence,” in Donald Judd: October Files, eds. Annie Ochmanek and Alex Kitnick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 119–132. Sol LeWitt and Dan Graham incorporated images of the built environment in their published writings around the same time (see Chapter 5); LeWitt, “‘Ziggurats’: Liberating Set-backs to Architectural Fashion,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 24–25; and Dan Graham, “Homes for America: Early 20th-Century Possessable House to the Quasi-Discrete Cell of ’66,” Arts Magazine (December 1966–January 1967): 21–22. Graham later transformed the text and images of the published article into a collage (1966–67) and an offset lithograph (1971–72) that correspond more closely to his initial ideas that he had to adjust for the journal article. See Dan Graham, Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 99. Roberts, Smithson: Mirror-Travels, 61; see also Robert Smithson: Photo Works, ed. Robert A. Sobieszek (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993) 86–91. 100. Philip Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art, transl. by Fiona Elliott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 134. See also Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 4 (January 1965): 26–32, reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968): 387–399; and Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America 53, no. 5 (October-November 1965): 57–69; re­ printed in Minimal Art: Anthology, 274–297. 101. Robert Smithson, in Moira Roth, “An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973),” transcribed and annotated by Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, Robert Smithson (Los Angeles: Museum of Con­ temporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004), 83. The interview with Smithson was one of thirty-six that Roth conducted as part of her PhD dissertation “Marcel Duchamp and America, 1913– 1974.” A  heavily edited and shortened version of this interview was published as Moira Roth, “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: An Interview,” Artforum 12, no. 2 (October 1973):

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47. Duchamp’s posthumous retrospective (he died in 1968) opened September 1973 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Anne D’Harnoncourt, ed., Marcel Duchamp: A Retrospective Exhibition (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, and New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973). 102. Smithson, in Roth, “Interview”, 88. 103. Duchamp’s early readymades are convincingly interpreted as referencing Parisian buildings and monuments by James Housefield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Art and the Geography of Modern Paris,” Geographical Review 92, no. 4 (October 2002): 477–502. 104. For late 1967 the circulation number for Artforum was 10,918. See Amy Newman, Challeng­ ing Art: Artforum 1962–74 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), 88. 105. In addition to the sources already mentioned, see Simon Ward, “Sites Of Memory, Sites of the Imagination: Monumental and Urban Space,” in Imagining the City: The Politics of Urban Space, 2, eds. Christian Emden, Catherine Keen, and David Midgley (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 241–262; Sébastien Marot, Suburbanisme et Art de la Mémoire (Paris: Éditions des La Vil­ lette, 2002), 38–50; and Michael McDonough, “Architecture‘s Unnoticed Avant-Garde,” in Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environment Art, ed. Alan Sonfist (New York: Plume 1983), 233–252. 106. Lewis Mumford, “Masterpiece of Mediocrity,” The New Yorker, March 10, 1951: 85, 89. See also Mumford’s discussion of the Port Authority bus terminal during the symposium “How to Combine Architecture, Painting and Sculpture” that took place at the MoMA on March 19, 1951; published in Interiors 110, no. 1 (May 10, 1951): 100–105. 107. Andrew M. Shanken, “Planning Memory: Living Memorials in the United States during World War II,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 2002): 130–147. 108. Slifkin, The New Monuments, 120. 109. Philip C. Johnson, “War Memorials: What Aesthetic Price Glory?” Art News 44, no. 11 (Sep­ tember 1945): 10. Johnson does not provide a source for Eleanor Roosevelt’s quotation. 110. Le Corbusier, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches: Voyage au pays des timid personnes, 1937; translated into English as When the Cathedrals Were White: Journey to the Country of Timid People, 1947; Donald Judd, “Month in Review,” Arts Magazine (October 1964), re­ printed in Complete Writings, 137. See also Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge, MA: MIT 2001); and Darl Rastofer, Six Bridges: The Legacy of Othmar H. Ammann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 111. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 70. 112. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (Septem­ ber 1968): 50; reprinted in Smithson: Collected Writings, 112. 113. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, transl. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). First published as La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma Gallimard, 1980). 114. Randall Mason, The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 30–31, 98–113; and Ludger Der­ enthal, “The Image of Architecture,” in Ein Neuer Blick: Architekturfotografie aus den Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, ed. Derenthal and Christine Kühn (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2010), 350–354. 115. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 72. 116. Roberts, Smithson: Mirror Travels, 69, 9–10. On the notion of entropy, see also Ronald Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2004); Robert Smithson: Le Paysage Entropique 1960–73 (Marseille: Musées de Marseille, Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993); Eugenie Tsai, ed. Robert Smithson Un­ earthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Eva Schmidt, “Et in Utah Ego: Robert Smithson’s ‘entropologisches’ Kino,” in Robert Smithson: Zeichnungen—Drawings (Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturge­ schichte Münster, 1989), 42–65; and Dieter Meschede, “Entropie: Weil die Zeit eine Richtung besitzt,” in Smithson: Zeichnungen, 66, 67. The meaning of ruins varies greatly throughout history and much diverse literature exists on the topic. A popular book during the 1960s of which Smithson owned the 1967 edition is Rose D. Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (Lon­ don: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953). See also Hartmut Böhme, “Die Ästhetik der Ruine,” in Der Schein des Schönen, eds. Dieter Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Göttingen: Steidl, 1989), 287–304; Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruin,” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006): 6–21; and

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Brian Dillon, ed., Ruins, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2011). 117. Reynolds, Smithson: Learning from New Jersey, 59–67. 118. The additional photographs are reproduced in Smithson: Photo Works, 86–93. 119. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 71. 120. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 71. 121. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 71. 122. The map takes the form of a stepped triangle, which Reynolds discussed in relationship to visual perception and an earlier sculpture by Smithson. See Reynolds, Smithson: Learn­ ing from New Jersey, 92. Smithson’s use of maps, diagrams, and plans was influenced by his experience as a consultant for the architecture and engineering firm Tippetts-AbbettMcCarthy—Stratton (TAMS). He addressed his work with TAMS in the essay Robert Smith­ son, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” Artforum 6, no. 10 (June 1967): 36–40, reprinted in Smithson: Collected Writings, 52–60. See also Mark Linder, Nothing Less Than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 133–167; Janna Eggebeen, “ ‘Between Two Worlds’: Robert Smithson and Aerial Art,” Public Art Dia­ logue 1, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 87–111; and Romón Pico, “Aerial Art: The New Landscape of Robert Smithson,” Journal of Architecture and Urbanism 43, no. 2 (2019): 181–191. 123. The US Geological Survey was charged to map the country  in 1879 and has been the pri­ mary civilian mapping agency of the United States since. The best known USGS maps are the 1:24,000-scale topographic maps, also known as 7.5-minute quadrangles. The map that Smithson used was already outdated, showing the Passaic River in its pre-1967 course. 124. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 74. 125. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 74. 126. Smithson also used the terms site and nonsite to upend the center/periphery dichotomy. See Lawrence Alloway, “Sites/Nonsites,” in Robert Smithson: Sculpture, ed. Robert Hobbs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 41–45; Ursprung, Grenzen der Kunst, 286–305; and Susanneh Bieber, “Nonsite, Off-Site, the Rhizome and the Ship; or the Impermanence of Site Specificity,” in Off-Site (Fresno, CA: Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science, 2006), 4–11. 127. Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” in Smithson: Collected Writings, 72. 128. Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006), 1. See also Laurajane Smith, Archeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge, 2004); John H. Stubbs, Time Honored: A Global View of Architectural Conservation (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley  & Sons, 2009; John H. Stubbs and Emily G. Makaš, Architectural Conservation in Europe and the Americas (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011). 129. Stern, New York 1960, 1115–17. Henry-Russell Hitchcock stated that “Johnson was one of the loudest protesters” against Penn Station’s destruction; see his introduction in Philip John­ son: Architecture, 1949–1965 (New York, Chicago, and San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 26. Walter Gropius was one of the few architects in favor of Penn Station’s destruction and publicly justified his position in “Tradition and Continuity in Architecture,” part 3, Architectural Record 136 (July 1964): 152. See also Ada Louise Huxtable, “The Uses of the Past,” The New York Times, February 25, 1966, 28. The first executive committee of the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York included Diana Kirsch as secretary, Costas Machlouzarides as treasurer, and Norval White as chair; see “Action Group for Better Architecture in New York,” The New York Preservation Archive Project (blog), www.nypap. org/preservation-history/agbany/ [accessed August 14, 2021]. 130. Matthew A. Postal, ed., Guide to New York City Landmarks (New York: Wiley and New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, 2009), 58. 131. Postal, Guide to New York City Landmarks, 50–51. Greenwich Village Historic District: Designation Report, vol. 1 (New York: City of New York, Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration, and Landmarks Preservation Commission, 1969). 132. Postal, Guide to New York City Landmarks, 38–40. SoHo-Cast Irion Historic District: Des­ ignation Report (New York: City of New York, Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Ad­ ministration, and Landmarks Preservation Commission, 1973). 133. Smith, Uses of Heritage, 4. 134. United States Department of the Interior and National Park Service, “News Release: FiftySeven Sites Recommended for Historic Landmark Status by Park Advisory Board,” Novem­ ber 13, 1966. Archive of the National Register of Historical Places, ref. # 66000736; Jack

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Eisen, “Status as Historic Landmarks Sought for a Brewery, Mines, Ships,” The Washington Post, November 13, 1966, A33. 135. The Origins of Cast Iron Architecture in America, includes D. D. Badger, “Illustrations of Iron Architecture Made by the Architectural Iron Work of the City of New York,” and James Bogardus, “Cast Iron Buildings: Their Construction and Advantages,” with an introduction by Walter Knight Struges (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970). See also David M. Kahn, “Bog­ ardus, Fire, and the Iron Tower,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35, no. 3 (October 1, 1976): 186–203; and Marie Ennis and Donald Friedman, “Cast-Iron Facades as Structural Shear Walls,” Journal of Architectural Conservation 17, no. 3 (January 2011): 43–58. 136. In 1969 Julie Judd, née Finch, and her husband Donald, who had bought a cast-iron building on 101 Spring Street the previous year, co-founded the group Artists Against the Expressway. Their home would serve as an administrative office and Finch served as chairperson and primary contact person for the organization. For a critical assessment of Judd’s involvement with Artists’ Against the Expressway and Citizens for Artists’ Housing see Andrew Wasser­ man, “Judd’s Space: A Marginal Absence in the Flight for SoHo Housing,” Visual Resources 31, 3–4 (2015): 155–176. See also David J. Getsy, Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Perfor­ mance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 1. 137. Michael Stern, “Lower Manhattan Happy That Road Is ‘Dead,’ ” The New York Times, July 18, 1969, 35; Simpson, SoHo: The Artist in the City, 129–152. 138. Postal, Guide to New York City Landmarks, 38–40; and Simpson, SoHo, 224–226. 139. James Marston Fitch, The Aesthetics of Function (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); and James Marston Fitch, “Curatorial Management of Historical Landscapes,” Ekistics 45, no. 271 (July/August 1978): 284–289. 140. Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950– 1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Suleiman Osman, “Gentrification in the United States,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2014; published online May 2016); Eric Clark, “The Order and Simplicity of Gentrification,” in Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, eds. Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 261–269; Sharon Zukin, The Death and Life of Authentic Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” Annual Re­ view of Sociology 13 (1987): 129–147. 141. Smithson: Photo Works, 110–122; see also Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: Sculpture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 164–165. 142. Robert Smithson, “Hotel Palenque,” Parkett 43 (1995), 117–132. See also Robert Smithson: Hotel Palenque (Mexico City: Alias Editorial, 2010). 143. No. 5/10 denotes the fifth slide out of the ten selected for reproduction in this book. I use this numbering throughout this section. 144. Smithson, “Hotel Palenque,” Parkett, 120. 145. On the relationship between archeology and land art, see Robert J. Kett, “Monumentality as Method: Archeology and Land Art in the Cold War,” Representations 130, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 119–151; Rebecca Ann Butterfield, “Colonizing the Past: Archaic References and the Archeological Paradigm in Contemporary American Earth Art,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1998. 146. Smithson, “Hotel Palenque,” Parkett, 117. 147. Smithson drew the map of the hotel in his sketchbook. 148. Smithson, “Hotel Palenque,” 118. 149. Smithson, “Hotel Palenque,” 121. 150. Smithson, “Hotel Palenque,” 119. 151. Smithson, “Hotel Palenque,” 119. 152. Ursprung, Limits of Art, 140; see also Philip Ursprung, “Robert Smithsons Hotel Palenque,” Daidalos 62 (December  1996): 148–153; and Jeremy Millar, “Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque (1969–1972),” Holt/Smithson Foundation, September 2020. https://holtsmithson­ foundation.org/robert-smithson-hotel-palenque-1969–72. [accessed April 20, 2021] 153. Timothy Martin, “De-Architecturisation and the Architectural Unconscious: A Tour of Rob­ ert Smithson’s Chambers and Hotels,” in The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity, eds. Alex Coles and Alexia Defert (London: Backless Books, 1998), 89–114.

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154. David Stuart and George Stuart, Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 22–23. 155. George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya and An­ dean Peoples (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962), 133. In an unpublished essay of 1967 enti­ tled “The Artist as Site-Seer,” Smithson refers to Kubler’s ideas as suggesting “an ‘equality’ between the ‘prime’ and the ‘replication’.” See Smithson Writings, 340. 156. Michael D. Coe, The Maya (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1967), 102. 157. Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum (September 1969), reprinted in Smithson: Collected Writings, 128. Smithson’s former library is part of the Rob­ ert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institu­ tion, Washington, DC. The palace’s grand staircase ascending the western side of the platform was being rebuilt. 158. Kubler, Art and Architecture of Ancient America, 130–134, and Coe, Maya, 102–109. 159. Stuart, Palenque, 153–154; Coe, Maya, 102. See also Michael D. Coe, The Maya, 7th ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 130–140; Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, Chroni­ cle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 6–23, 154–175; Damien B. Marken, “The Construction Chronol­ ogy of Palenque: Seriation with an Architectural Form,” in Palenque: Recent Investigations at the Classic Maya Center, ed. Damien B. Marken (New York: AltaMira Press, 2007), 67–81; and Damien B. Marken and Arnolod Gonzáles Cruz, “Elite Residential Compounds at Late Classic Palenque,” in Palenque: Recent Investigations, 135–160. 160. John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 2 vol. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841); and John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yu­ catan, 2 vol. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1843). See also Frederick Catherwood, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1844). 161. Western archeologists established a lasting presence at Palenque during the 1920s. During the 1930s the excavation and restoration of the palace was a major focus of activity. When Smith­ son traveled there in the late 1960s, the palace’s grand staircase ascending the western side of the platform was being rebuilt. For the history of Palenque explorations since the sixteenth century see Stuart, Palenque, 35–105. 162. For Smithson’s Yucatán essay in the context of the expedition by Stephens, see Roberts, Smith­ son: Mirror-Travels, 86–112; and Jennifer L. Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatán,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 544–567. 163. See Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson, “The Domain of the Great Bear,” Art Voices (1966), 44–51, reprinted in Smithson: Collected Writings, 24–31. 164. Roberts, Smithson: Mirror-Travels, 96. Catherwood’s panorama was built in 1838; see Ste­ phen Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schnei­ der (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 317–23; Tripp R. Evans, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820–1915 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 53, 73. 165. Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, 155–156; and Andrew Menard, “Robert Smithson’s Environmental History,” Oxford Art Journal 37, no. 3 (December 2014): 285–304. 166. Tom Williams, “Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969,” Grey Room 31 (Spring 2008): 116–144; Hans Dickel, Claes Oldenburgs “Lipstick (Ascending) on Cater­ pillar Tracks,” Yale 1969: Kunst im Kontext der Studentenbewegung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1999); and Susanneh Bieber, “Judy Chicago’s Lipstick Sculptures at the Rolf Nel­ son Gallery: Ambiguities between Minimal Art, Pop, and Environments,” Getty Research Journal 17 (2023): 155–172.

5

Idea as Model Lawrence Weiner and Gordon Matta-Clark

Lawrence Weiner’s 1968 artwork A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A  WALL was one of twenty-four phrases that the artist published in a booklet called Statements. In early 1969, Weiner built the work, chiseling away a 36-by-36-inch area of plaster from a wall inside a tall Manhattan stone building, causing dust, noise, and a pile of debris to create a shallow square hole. The removal was part of the group show January 5–31, 1969, curated by Seth Siegelaub, who had rented an office space on the fourth floor of the McLendon Building on East 52nd Street in New York City to showcase new conceptual art.1 Two months later, the work was included in the exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form that opened at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in March 1969. Weiner flew to Europe to remove a 90-centimeter square section from the wall in the Kunsthalle’s staircase (Figure 5.1).2 The exhibition, along with Weiner’s work, traveled to the Mu­ seum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, and then to the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. The materiality, color, and size of the removal continued to change as the work was created anew. In his conceptual art practice, Weiner interrogated the relationship between the idea of a work and its materializations. He expanded upon the artistic practices of Olden­ burg and Smithson, who—as discussed in the previous chapter—paid attention to the various contexts that shaped the meanings of a work of art. Weiner more forcefully emphasized the precarity between ideas and physical realizations. He, as well as Gordon Matta-Clark, artists who are respectively associated with conceptual and site-specific art, probed, upended, even intentionally foiled the transformation between dematerialized ideas and built objects or structures. They considered the generation of a concept and the implementation of that concept as closely intertwined yet separate processes. In this regard, their work functioned analogously to mechanisms typical in architecture, where architects and planners render an idea in the form of drawings, sections, models, zoning resolutions, or building codes that then is to be materially constructed in a separate step and often by a different group of practitioners, technicians, and construction workers. The logic of New York City’s zoning resolution, in particular, served as a point of in­ spiration for the development of conceptual art. New York was the first city in the nation that ratified a zoning resolution during the early twentieth century, providing a general framework for architects, builders, and developers to create specific designs. During the 1950s, the New York City Planning Commission debated changes to the original code and ratified a new zoning resolution in 1961 to guarantee the viability and livability of communally inhabited spaces. Guided by socially and aesthetically progressive aspira­ tions as well as economic and political interests, the city’s 1961 zoning resolution aimed DOI: 10.4324/9781003295105-5

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Figure 5.1 Lawrence Weiner, A 36” × 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL, 1968. Artist building the work for Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzer­ land, 1969. Source: © 2023 Lawrence Weiner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Shunk Kender.

to solve the predicament between individual freedom and public responsibility. These values were ideally to be interwoven and balanced. In 1966 artist Sol LeWitt wrote an es­ say about the city’s old and new zoning resolutions, exploring how immaterial rules and ideas impacted the shape of built forms. The zoning resolutions served him as a model to move from his minimalist objects of the early 1960s towards conceptual art. LeWitt’s practice thus closely links minimal and conceptual art and also shows the intricate rela­ tionality between avant-garde art and architectural discourses.

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Weiner, as one of the main innovators associated with the emergence of conceptual art during the late 1960s, has long been associated with the negation of the mate­ rial object. However, recent scholarship, for example by Christian Berger, Catherine Morris, and Vincent Bonin, has emphasized the neglected materiality of conceptual art.3 Indeed, Weiner’s written statements of 1968 initially functioned as descriptions of works of art he had physically made. Only subsequently did the statements precede built forms and themselves became works of art. As an artist, Weiner was interested in the linguistic, conceptual framing of objects, situations, and environments because of language’s political, democratic potential. A work like A REMOVAL TO THE LATH­ ING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL was easily, widely, and equitably distributed. Innumerable people could materialize the general, immaterial statement within the different social, geopolitical, and historical contexts in which they lived. Language thereby could assume or take on specific form, materiality, and meaning. To think of Weiner’s linguistic statements not just in terms of the materiality of language, as numerous scholars have done, but as equivalent to material, specific forms in the built environment, helps reassert the political heft of his conceptual practice. Whereas Weiner’s conceptual work from the late 1960s and early 70s has rarely been grounded in architectural and urban discourses, scholarship on Matta-Clark has always highlighted his close if strained relationship to architecture. Trained as an ar­ chitect at Cornell University, his turn to art in the form of building cuts for which he became known during the early 1970s has been positioned as antagonistic not only to the functionalist mantra of modernist architecture but also to the formalist approach developed at Cornell, where architectural historian and critic Colin Rowe was an in­ fluential teacher. Creating site-specific building interventions allowed Matta-Clark to engage more directly than his teachers with the complex material and social layers of the built environment. However, he also had a strong interest in conceptual and formal aspects of art and architecture. Recent publications by Frances Richard, Gwendolyn Owens, and Philip Ursprung, for instance, draw attention to the artist’s use of language in relation to built space.4 Matta-Clark’s work closely entangles the immaterial with the site-specific aspects of the built environment. Taking sections and plans as visual, idea-based starting points and then literally and materially implementing them against any conventional architectural rules was a formal-aesthetic as well as a sociopolitical endeavor. Weiner and Matta-Clark are well-known figures in the history of avant-garde art that advanced beyond minimal, pop, and earth art to conceptual art during the late 1960s and site-specific practices by the early 1970s. In 1968 Lucy Lippard and John Chandler intro­ duced the term “dematerialization” into American avant-garde discourses to capture the idealist, anti-materialist tendency of the new conceptual art.5 Lippard and other critics emphasized the political potentials of dematerialization, first in its ability to circumvent the capitalist, materialist art market and then also as a means to decentralize avant-garde art beyond the male-dominated, New York–focused art world. Art critic and historian Benjamin Buchloh championed conceptual artists, among them Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, and Weiner, who critiqued art’s imbrication within its own institution, thus ad­ dressing social and political issues beyond the secluded cube of the gallery.6 As an exten­ sion of this trajectory, Matta-Clark’s building cuts were seen as directly engaging with the social and material spaces of everyday life, ushering in the notion of site specificity. Poststructural critics theorized these developments in avant-garde art as an expansion

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Figure 5.2 Lawrence Weiner, cover and sample pages from Statements, 1968. Artist book. New York: Seth Siegelaub/The Louis Kellner Foundation. Source: © 2023 Lawrence Weiner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Brian Forrest.

from formal, idealist to sociopolitical concerns, thereby however ignoring the references to architecture that had played into the work of many avant-garde artists throughout the long sixties. As Americans born in New York City, the positionalities of Weiner and Matta-Clark were framed by patriarchal Western social structures. Having the privilege to travel and live abroad enabled both artists to understand the reigning American notions of progress as nationally and culturally specific rather than as universally valid. As a teenager, Weiner hitchhiked through the United States, making his way from New York to Alabama and the West Coast and also traveling to the Arctic and Mexico. Gaining success as one of the conceptual artists around Siegelaub, he was invited to visit and show his work in Eu­ rope and Latin America. By 1970, he lived part of the year in Amsterdam, where he had bought a barge moored at Westerdoksdijk.7 Matta-Clark grew up between New York, Chile, and France. His mother, who raised Gordon and his twin brother Sebastian after divorcing her husband, moved with the two boys to Chile—where the paternal grand­ parents lived—and then to Paris before returning to New York City. Matta-Clark, who spoke English, Spanish, and French, was keenly aware of different cultural, national, and linguistic frameworks. As an adult he continued to travel between the United States, Latin America, and Europe, creating site-specific works in various locations.8 The per­ sonal experiences sensitized both artists to think of their formal-aesthetic innovations not just across disciplines but also transnationally. Lawrence Weiner When Lawrence Weiner first created the work A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL in late 1968, it consisted of words on paper. Along with the other twenty-three notations printed in

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Statements—one to a sheet—it was arranged as a block of printed letters just below the centerline of the page. The phrases in Statements were set in the sans serif font Univ­ ers and, except for the first letter of each sentence, lowercase. Measuring seven by four inches, the publication was bound in a gray soft cover carrying its title, the name of the artist, and the purchase price of $1.95 (Figure 5.2).9 Given the print run—the booklet was produced in an offset edition of about 1,000—small size, and affordability, State­ ments and the phrases printed within easily traveled beyond New York City to other places, cities, and countries. Weiner organized the twenty-four notations in Statements into two sections. The first section, titled “general statements,” was followed by “specific statements.” A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL was presented as a general statement. It provided some details as to the sculp­ tural situation described but left many variables unaccounted for, including the color and texture of the work and the size of the removal. This work became specific when Weiner physically chiseled away a square area of paint and plaster—measuring three by three feet—for January 5–31, 1969. In the exhibition catalog, the statement now read A 36” × 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL. It was reproduced alongside a photograph of the removal that Weiner had made for the show. Visitors who made their way up to the fourth floor of the McLendon building in Janu­ ary 1969 could experience the visual and material form of the work, its size, texture, and depth. However, the removal as such was only visible because of the context. Viewers could not identify an autonomous, self-contained art object but only grasped the removal due to what remained. Citing another removal work, Weiner explained: “There was no seeing whether the removal was the art or what was left was the art.”10 The cipher of the hole, employed by numerous artists at the time, among them Oldenburg and Smithson, eloquently refuted the idea of art as a self-contained, autonomous object. The January exhibition, which also featured the work of Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, and Joseph Kosuth, was a milestone in the development of conceptual art, where ideas seemed to take preeminence over objects. Indeed, curator Seth Siegelaub explained that the exhibi­ tion was “intended to serve only as supplementary material to the catalogue.”11 The title inscribed on the exhibition announcement card, “0 Objects, 0 Painters, 0 Sculptures, 4 Artists,” reiterated that art need neither be a material object nor adhere to a specific medium. Weiner was a painter before becoming a sculptor and then turning to language as one of his main media. Born in 1942 in the South Bronx, he was raised by assimilated Jewish parents, who owned a candy store on the corner of 149th Street and Southern Boulevard. He worked there from an early age before taking various other jobs, such as working at the docks. When first seriously thinking about becoming an artist after graduating from Stuyvesant High School, he frequently made his way to the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street, where he “discovered a lot of things.”12 Following the reigning style of the times, he first painted in an abstract expressionist manner. But he soon turned to pop and minimal art for inspiration, as exemplified by his Propeller paintings (1964–1965), in which he rendered a TV test-pattern in bright, flat shapes. He then created a number of stretched monochromatic canvases from which he cut away geometric notches (1966– 1967). For this series, he occasionally asked the buyers to determine the size of the notch to be removed, thus involving his audience in the design if not the material making of the artwork. Siegelaub became an instrumental figure for Weiner, supporting his work and

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showing it first in his gallery and then by way of publications. At the time of the January show, Siegelaub no longer maintained a permanent space. The catalog January 5–31, 1969 featured eight statements by Weiner, alongside three photographs of realized works, two works he made in the rented fourth-floor office space and one he had made outdoors, a two-inch-wide trench dug across a private driveway in Mamoroneck, New York, twenty miles north of Manhattan. The publication also fea­ tured Weiner’s statement of intent, which read: 1. The artist may construct the work 2. The work may be fabricated 3. The work need not be built Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to con­ dition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.13 Weiner thus asserted that a work like A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUP­ PORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL did not need to be materially realized or that he was the one who had to make it. However, as numerous photographs such as the one from Bern show, the artist continued to create removals in various specific locations. In 1970, the work was again shown in New York City, this time in the exhibition Using Walls at the Jewish Museum. A note in the exhibition archive at the Jewish Museum indicates that Weiner was “out of town” and states: “Make appoint­ ment with Dan Graham . . . to do work.”14 This suggests that in 1970 the responsibility for realizing the piece preferably fell to the artist or someone designated by him and that a material realization of the work was favored over “just” printing the statement in the catalog. Indeed, the catalogs for Using Walls as well as for Live in Your Head featured not only the statement but also reproduced a photograph of the work, which depicted— to be specific—the first removal that Weiner had realized in the McLendon Building. According to Weiner’s proposition, though, someone unknown to the artist could cre­ ate the work, or the work could exist only as a statement—all of which were of equal status to a work realized by the artist himself. In the statement of intent, Weiner realigned the processes of conception and realization that take place around the production of an artwork. These avant-garde ideas developed in analogy to architectural practices and were already present in the work of many minimal artists. As LeWitt, who was employed as a graphic designer for the architect I. M. Pei during the mid-1950s, stated: “Work­ ing in an architectural office, meeting architects, knowing architects had a big effect. An architect doesn’t go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick.”15 By 1966 LeWitt made minimal art objects and his work featured in the Primary Structures exhibition. In November of that year, he published the article “‘Ziggurats’: Liberating Set-backs to Architectural Fashion” in Arts Magazine, followed by his text “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” in the 1967 summer issue of Artforum. Not only was Weiner in­ timately familiar with LeWitt’s ideas as both artists circulated within the same social networks—including Siegelaub, Graham, and Lippard—but they also inhabited the same material environment in Lower Manhattan. Indeed, LeWitt who turned forty in 1968 was a supportive mentor to many younger artists, including Weiner, collecting their work and encouraging them in their endeavors.16 Taking a closer look at LeWitt’s two articles provides the ground for exploring how Weiner tapped the conceptual potential of archi­ tecture and advanced it in his own work.

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New York City Zoning Resolutions

In his article “Ziggurats,” LeWitt discussed a series of structures—the stepped sky­ scrapers characteristic of the Manhattan skyline—that were generated by a set of gen­ eral rules (Figure 5.3).17 LeWitt explained that the design of these buildings was a direct result of the rules laid down in New York City’s zoning resolution of 1916. The first such resolution in the United States, it was instituted to guarantee enough light and air in a city that threatened to become uninhabitable by overbuilding and overcrowding. One of the provisions of the resolution stipulated that a building could only reach a certain height before its facade had to be set back a minimum distance; it then could continue to rise to a further specified height, where another setback was required, and so forth. The height limitations of the setbacks were not absolute numbers but depended on a building’s location in the city—five different zones were defined—and on the width of the adjacent street.18 The 1916 zoning resolution thus constituted a general framework within which to design a specific building. Assessing the impact of the rules, LeWitt wrote: The zoning code pre-conceived the design of the ziggurats, just as an idea might give any work of art its outer boundaries and remove arbitrary and capricious decisions. In many cases this is a liberating rather than a confining form. The ziggurat buildings conform to the code, yet no two are alike.19

Figure 5.3 Sol LeWitt, “‘Ziggurats’: Liberating Set-Backs to Architectural Fashion,” Arts Maga­ zine, November 1966; reprinted in exhibition catalog designed by LeWitt for his 1978 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 172–173. Source: © 2023 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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The 1916 zoning resolution allowed for a variety of designs, but only one building type—the ziggurat—yielded the largest floor capacity. The ordinance prescribed the maximum height of setbacks beginning at the street line of the lot. Within such limits, a building could be designed in a variety of configurations that neither had to cover the entire site nor had to rise to a maximum height. However, developers and property own­ ers usually asked architects to expand the size of a building to its maximum capacity in order to yield the largest usable space and thus the best economic return. A forty-story ziggurat building, for example, with a footprint covering the entire lot resulted in more usable space than a tower with a straight facade of the same height that sat on only a third of the same lot. According to the 1916 code, a building taking up 25 percent of the lot or less could rise to any height, but during the first half of the twentieth century, it was expensive to expand a structure with a small footprint beyond forty floors due to techni­ cal reasons. In addition, the space needed for the service core on each floor, particularly for the elevator and staircase, remained relatively stable even if the area it served was smaller, thus yielding a less economically favorable ratio of floor area to service core. In light of these factors, the ziggurats were the most economically profitable designs under the given code. During the late 1950s, the New York City Planning Commission worked on updat­ ing the 1916 zoning resolution, responding to economic, technological, and aesthetic changes. In “Ziggurats,” LeWitt questioned whether the revised New York City zoning resolution, which in 1961 was ratified by the City Planning Commission and unani­ mously approved by the Board of Estimate, marked an improvement.20 The rules con­ cerning land use, the size of buildings in relation to plot, and the density of occupancy were generally stricter, but numerous different building designs that would all yield the highest usable floor space were possible. One of the major innovations of the 1961 reso­ lution was the floor-to-area ratio (FAR), where the maximum floor capacity of a building was determined in relation to the area of its lot. For example, in a zone designated with a FAR of one, the total floor space of a building could not be larger than the area of the lot. Implementation of this requirement could take various forms, such as a one-story building covering an entire lot, a two-story building covering half the lot, or a ten-story high-rise occupying 10 percent of the lot (Figure 5.4). Any variation not exceeding the allocated ratio was permitted.21 Professionals in the architectural field who understood the task of building not only as a rational, economic endeavor but also as an art striving for aesthetic and innovative de­ sign solutions favored the FAR provision. Under the new rules developers would be less

Figure 5.4 Harrison, Ballard & Allen, diagram illustrating the concept of floor area ratio (FAR), in Plan for Rezoning the City of New York, 1950. All examples illustrated have a floor area ratio of 1.0. Source: Courtesy of HathiTrust.

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likely to commission a specific building type and instead give architects greater latitude as long as the maximum floor area would be achieved. Aesthetic decisions could play a more important role alongside monetary and practical factors. Modernist architects, in particular, were supportive of FAR because of their predilection for tall steel-and-glass towers that occupied only a part of the lot and left room for large publicly accessible plazas. Real estate developers and property owners, however, critiqued the new proposed rules because the allocated ratios significantly reduced a building’s overall allowable floor area. They argued that the new zoning resolution would lower their profits, slow down construction, and in turn reduce land values and the city’s tax revenues. To appease developers, the New York City Planning Commission proposed a bonus system. The system granted six additional square feet of usable floor space for every square foot of publicly accessible plaza area. In addition, it offered further offsets for courtyards, arcades, and terraces. Developers welcomed the bonus system because they could increase the maximum floor space of a building. At the same time, progressive planners and modernist architects were pleased with the change because the bonus sys­ tem encouraged the incorporation of plazas, which would yield light and air and provide welcome social spaces for the public to find relief in a crowded city. The preference for this building type was influenced by modernist ideals, most significantly Le Corbusier’s “tower in the park” scheme and Mies van der Rohe’s renderings of glass towers. In the postwar United States, the architectural and engineering firm SOM was among the most prolific to build tall steel-and-glass towers with publicly accessible plazas or courtyards, as exemplified in the Lever House of 1952 and the Union Carbide Building of 1960. These, along with the Seagram Building completed in 1959 as discussions on the new zoning resolutions were underway, served as exemplary models. Rather than encouraging a greater variety of buildings, the New York City zoning resolution of 1961 precipitated the replacement of one dominant building type with an­ other.22 LeWitt thus argued in “Ziggurats” that the architectural designs emerging under the revised zoning resolution—he called them “slab-type buildings”—were “established by the rules of taste and aestheticism.”23 It seems that LeWitt’s disapproval was directed not at a particular type of building but at the whims of fashion by which an old style falls into disrepute and is soon replaced by a new one. In “Ziggurats,” he made a point to appreciate what had become out of date. He aptly described the early brick ziggurat buildings as “opaque and homely,” contrasting their old-fashioned designs with modern­ ist glass-and-steel skyscrapers.24 The article concludes with a pointed observation about Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum, which had just opened to great acclaim two months earlier, in September 1966: Ironically the new Whitney Museum is an upside down ziggurat and is considered high-style, while the [ziggurat] office buildings are not thought to be very classy. In view of this obvious suspension of judgment it might be time to take a new look at the ziggurats. Many will be seen to be valuable works of art.25 By no means does LeWitt provide an encompassing analysis of New York City’s zon­ ing resolutions, new or old; rather, his sly critique of architectural fashion and aestheti­ cism demonstrates an awareness of larger social, invisible frameworks that articulate themselves in built forms. As Kirsten Swenson observed, “with ‘Ziggurats,’ LeWitt estab­ lished a parallel between the New York zoning codes and his conceptual practice.”26 As an artist, he considered the invisible rules that guided the production of forms; he sought

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to make the unseen visible and material. The intricate relationship between conception and realization, along with a shift of emphasis from the latter to the former, were central ideas that LeWitt further developed in his subsequent text “Paragraphs of Conceptual Art.”27 The frontispiece of “Paragraphs,” when published in the summer 1967 issue of Artforum, included a photo by Dan Graham picturing receding granite steps, which for­ mally reference the ziggurat-style composition and thus link LeWitt’s two articles visually and conceptually.28 “Paragraphs” became an influential text that defined the parameters of conceptual art, and has been cited extensively by artists, critics, and historians. LeWitt focused on the principles and concerns that guided his own work but also included images of exem­ plary contemporary artworks, so that “Paragraphs” functions both as an artist’s state­ ment and as an overview of current tendencies. After the introductory paragraph, LeWitt explained: I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made be­ forehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.29 When creating a work, LeWitt was first concerned with developing a concept, which de­ tailed such aspects as the shape and size, the spatial relation between parts, the material, color, and texture, and whether the piece was to be two- or three-dimensional. Once the concept was formulated, the artist rationally followed it to complete the work. According to LeWitt, conceptual art was intellectually rather than visually and emo­ tionally stimulating. In “Paragraphs,” he noted that a conceptual artist mostly avoids interesting shapes, impressive size, complex arrangements, stimulating colors, and new materials because they tend to become self-expressive devices. He thus preferred sim­ ple shapes and materials, unassuming colors, and repetitive arrangements so that the physicality of an artwork did not distract from its concept. LeWitt sought to avoid the kind of emotional subjectivity characteristic of expressionist art, where conception and realization were indistinguishable, as in abstract expressionist paintings, which conveyed the artist’s subjective disposition through spontaneous gestures or emotionally charged forms. In contrast to expressionist art practices, LeWitt focused his creativity on develop­ ing a concept, which then guided the rational execution of a work. In “Paragraphs,” he explained that “the fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the bet­ ter. This eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as much as possible. That is the reason for using this method.”30 The three-dimensional work that LeWitt created at the time consisted of geometric, minimalist forms that he often arranged in series so that the viewer could unravel the logic of the work. Serial Project #1 (ABCD) of 1967, for example, includes four modular permutations—A, B, C, and D—each taking up a quarter of the sculptural ensemble. A gridded lattice, which consists of twenty-five times twenty-five square units provides the basic module for all subsequent forms (Figure 5.5). Within each series, an inner set of forms—squares, cubes, and stacked cubes—are nestled within outer forms—larger squares, cubes, and stacked cubes. The two sets within each series are variously com­ bined as open/open forms (Series A, left anterior in Figure  5.5), as closed/open forms (Series B, right anterior), as open/closed forms (Series C, right posterior), and as closed/

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Figure 5.5 Sol LeWitt, Serial Project #1 (ABCD), 1966. Baked enamel on steel units over baked enamel on aluminum, 20 in. × 13 ft. 7 in. × 13 ft. 7 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Agnes Gund and purchase (by exchange). Source: © 2023 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

closed forms (Series D, left posterior). Even though a number of the combined forms in series C and D include objects that are invisible because they are inside a larger closed form, viewers are able to infer the existence of the inner form and its exact size by looking at the four sets together and grasping the concept that guided the sculpture as a whole. The visual, material forms of Serial Project #1 (ABCD) are intrinsically linked to the generating concept, just like the ziggurat buildings of the New York City skyline were the result of the city’s 1916 zoning resolution. As such, the artistic method LeWitt and conceptual artists employed mirrored the processes typical for architectural practition­ ers, who drew up zoning resolutions, diagrams, maps, floorplans, or architectural sec­ tions that guided the shapes of individual structures, buildings, and homes—in short, the built environment. For all the apparent rationality of LeWitt’s approach, he un­ derstood the activity of a conceptual artist as “intuitive” and was keen to differentiate it from functional and scientific endeavors. He emphasized that the conceptual artist conceives an idea neither to illustrate a theory (be it from the disciplines of mathematics or philosophy) nor for practical purposes (as would be the case in the applied sciences). In this regard, LeWitt also distinguished between art and architecture: “Architecture, whether it is a work of art or not, must be utilitarian or else fail completely. Art is not utilitarian.”31

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To bring home his point, LeWitt contemplated encasing the Empire State Building— New York City’s tallest ziggurat building—in a block of cement.32 With this hypotheti­ cal scenario, the artist clearly foiled any functional, practical, or economic intentions that he thought were fundamental to architecture. Indeed, his proposal to build cement walls around the Empire State Building is utterly irrational, even otherworldly; it is sly and humorous, not unlike Oldenburg’s proposals for the colossal monuments that he rendered so easily and fluidly on paper. LeWitt’s idea would render invisible the ziggurat form hidden within the block of cement. As such, it mirrors the sculptural scenarios in Serial Project #1 (ABCD), in which an inner structure is hidden within a closed form. Only by paying attention to the entire series, to more than just one building or form, is the viewer able to gauge invisible, underlying ideas. As discussed, the ziggurat buildings that had come to dominate New York City’s skyline between 1916 and 1961 were not just responding to the city’s zoning resolution but were also a result of the predominance of profit-seeking economic concerns. Progress was implicitly defined in monetary terms. LeWitt’s conceptual art practice reveals the close entanglement between ideas and reality, showing that visual and material forms—be it in art and architecture—reflect deep social structures. LeWitt generally assumed that the conception of an artwork was followed by its re­ alization in visual, material form, but he also raised the possibility that a concept alone constitutes art. He explained: If the artist carries through his idea and makes it into visible form, then all the steps in the process are of importance. The idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product. All intervening steps—scribbles, sketches, draw­ ings, failed work, models, studies, thought, conversations—are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product.33 Indeed, the photos of Serial Project #1 (ABCD) reproduced in Lippard’s 1967 article on LeWitt picture models, which the artist only subsequently fabricated with enameled alu­ minum, and the announcement card for his 1967 solo exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles featured a drawing he had made for Serial Project #1 (ABCD). These inter­ mediary objects question any clear distinction between concept and materialization. Was the drawing a concept or already the realization of the concept? And was the proposal to encase the Empire State Building a work of art, even though it was never realized? At the end of the article, LeWitt freely admitted: I have tried to state [my ideas] with as much clarity as possible. If the statements I made are unclear it may mean the thinking is unclear. Even while writing these ideas there seemed to be obvious inconsistencies (which I have tried to correct, but others will probably slip by).34 “Paragraphs” briefly addressed the perception of an artwork, which for LeWitt took place after the work was completed. “Once given physical reality by the artist,” he re­ marked, the work is open to the perception of all, including the artist. (I use the word ‘perception’ to mean the apprehension of the sense data, the objective understanding of the idea and simultaneously a subjective interpretation of both.)”35 LeWitt was aware that viewers see, experience, and interpret art differently and might not understand the

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concept that generated one of his works. These aspects were out of the artist’s hand, and LeWitt was not overtly concerned with that aspect of aesthetic experiences. It is here that Weiner advanced the ideas of LeWitt, mining the possibilities lodged in the perception and interpretation of a work and their impact on the construction of a work. Statements

Weiner not only delinked the activities of conception and realization but also shifted the possible act of realizing a concept to his viewers, thus giving them a stake in the making of a work of art. In LeWitt’s case, the artist conceived a concept or a set of rules, providing as many details as possible so that the process of realization—by the artist or a designated builder—became a mechanical act. Weiner, by contrast, posi­ tioned viewers and builders as active and equal participants in the production of the work. As such, Weiner’s work accounts for each participant’s mode of perception, the subjectivity of interpretations, and individuals’ cognitive and imaginative horizons that play into the process of realization. Viewers’ identities, including class, race, national­ ity, gender, or physical ability, bear on their decisions of how, where, and when or if to build the work of art. In the statement of intent quoted previously, Weiner insisted that “the decision as to condition [of the work] rests with the receiver upon occasion of receivership.” His audience thus also becomes responsible—by virtue of their specific choices—for the work of art. In Weiner’s case, the conceptual framing of a work of art came about as a description of sculptural pieces that he had realized. His idea of a linguistic phrase as the work of art developed in early 1968 in relation to his outdoor installation STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF. Invited to participate in a group show at Windham College in Vermont, which also included works by Carl Andre and Robert Barry, Weiner planted thirty-four stakes in the ground to form a rectangular grid measuring seventy by one hundred feet and then connected them with hemp twine (Figure 5.6). He had installed the piece on a field that students used to play touch football. When the athletes next met on the field, they were quick to cut the string and remove the stakes. Weiner recounted in a 2019 interview that everybody got all upset, and I  didn’t get particularly upset. It was either that—you see, I come from a different kind of a background. If somebody had done something like that, you kill them. I was not in the mood to kill anybody . . . over the work. You walk away from it if you’re not happy. I began the realization that it seemed to mean something. People talked about it, even though it wasn’t there anymore, so that was it. That’s pretty simple. . . . And then it became obvious to me that as long as you can present it, it didn’t matter how. Either you built it, you didn’t build it, you put in lan­ guage, you didn’t put it in language, as long as it wasn’t a secret.36 Weiner understood that even though the piece was no longer materially or visually pre­ sent as part of the exhibition, it still existed as a work. In the aftermath of these events, he created the drawing TURF, STAKE AND STRING, which he reproduced as a sticker for an edition of the magazine S.M.S.37 He also published the work in Statements, where it read: A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND AT REGULAR INTERVALS TO FORM A RECTANGLE TWINE STRUNG FROM STAKE TO STAKE TO DEMARK A GRID A RECTANGLE REMOVED FROM THIS RECTANGLE.

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Figure 5.6 Lawrence Weiner, A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND AT REGULAR INTERVALS TO FORM A  RECTANGLE TWINE STRUNG FROM STAKE TO STAKE TO DEMARK A  GRID A  RECTANGLE REMOVED FROM THIS REC­ TANGLE, 1968. Artist constructing the work for Hay, Mesh, String, Windham Col­ lege, Putney, VT, 1968. Source: © 2023 Lawrence Weiner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Throughout 1968, Weiner realized sculptural objects and situations that only there­ after he framed as a linguistic phrase. He assembled many of these works in Statements, which was published late that year. For example, Weiner threw paint onto the rear wall of his Manhattan studio, a brick building on Bleecker Street. The resulting “paint­ ing” was captured in a photograph. Only subsequently did Weiner frame the work as a linguistic phrase, publishing it in Statements as ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL. Similarly, he poured a pint of glossy paint on Robert and Julia Barry’s kitchen floor and left it there to dry. This time the act itself was documented in a photograph (Figure  5.7). A  few months later Weiner described the sculptural performance in Statements, where it read AN AMOUNT OF PAINT POURED DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR AND ALLOWED TO DRY. Rudi Fuchs, who curated an exhibition of Weiner’s work for the Van Abbemuseum in 1976, con­ firmed this sequence of events: “Statements of 1968 . . . summarized an activity, which started a few years before. Lawrence Weiner was then still involved in actually building pieces; most pieces in Statements were built before they were, as notations, presented in the book.”38 The temporal positionality between concept and object was very much in flux dur­ ing this time. When the term “conceptual” first appeared during the mid-1960s, avant­ garde critics used it to describe the work of minimal artists. For example, in her article

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Figure 5.7 Lawrence Weiner, AN AMOUNT OF PAINT POURED DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR AND ALLOWED TO DRY, 1968. Artist constructing the work in the kitchen of Robert and Julia Barry, 1968. Source: © 2023 Lawrence Weiner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“Looking at American Sculpture,” Barbara Rose compared Judd’s working process to the method employed by architects and designers, who drew plans but did not materi­ ally make the work; as such she deemed his art conceptual.39 In late 1966 and into 1967, numerous small exhibitions in New York City presented concepts in the form of draw­ ings, models, and verbal descriptions. They not only included concepts that were to be realized or had the potential of being realized but also statements that acted as a proof of a service rendered or a documentation of an action performed. The exhibition Work­ ing Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, organized by Mel Bochner for the gallery at New York’s School of Visual Arts in December 1966, featured a receipt from Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties Inc. for a work the shop had fabricated for Judd.40 In the same vein, many earth artists used photography, film, and text to document and disseminate work they had made. The word “statement” in Weiner’s practice initially functioned as a document—be it a photograph or a written or spoken phrase—that described a sculptural situation that the artist had created and only subsequently came to denote a concept that could be realized in the future. Weiner expanded his initial definition, taking, no doubt, impetus from Le­ Witt’s writing and practice. The work TWO MINUTES OF SPRAY PAINT DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR FROM A STANDARD AEROSOL SPRAY CAN is testament to the friendship and productive dialogue between the two artists. Weiner first made that

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work in 1968, spraying paint with an aerosol can on the wooden floor of LeWitt’s Man­ hattan studio on Hester Street. The resulting paint blotch, opaque at the center and fuzz­ ing out at its edges was recorded in a photograph. He included the work in January 5–31, 1969, not as a realized painting but as a phrase in the catalog. The written statement was followed by the entry: “Collection: Mr. Sol Lewitt [sic] N.Y.,”41 providing details as to the owner and location of the work. The statement thus describes an existing work, the one that the artist realized in LeWitt’s studio. At the same time, the statement itself is the work, and it is a concept to engender numerous future works in various locations, of different shapes and colors. Weiner came to think of the relationship between sculptural objects and written statements as either one able to precede the other.42 Between 1968 and 1970, Weiner focused more and more on the written statements as the main fulcrum of his practice. The written phrases allowed him to leave many of a work’s defining features open and thus give more responsibility to the audience. But, as Sabeth Buchmann states, Weiner’s work “attains its meaning only in the ambivalence between localization and de-localization.”43 Weiner, for example, initially thought of the work A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL as a general statement, which became specific when he realized it as a three-by-three-foot removal in the McLendon Building on East 52nd Street in January 1969. However, even the general statement was circumscribed by the artist’s local environment. Interior walls in New York City apartments had largely been made with lath and plaster. Wall board, a new mass-produced material, became popular due to its affordable price and easy installation but until 1968 was not deemed suitable for the construction of interior walls under the existing New York City Building Code. That year, the Planning Commission ratified a new Building Code to address the rapidly changing development of new materials and techniques in construction.44 The commission opted for performance-based rules that did not prescribe specific materials or techniques but allowed architects, structural engineers, and builders to choose among the many avail­ able options so long as the result performed according to required standards. Under the new building code, the construction sector could swiftly incorporate innovative materials and techniques that entered the market, while the City Planning Commission was not required to continuously update the building code or deal with waves of special permit re­ quests. Load-bearing walls, for example, had to uphold a certain amount of pressure per square foot rather than having to be constructed with a particular material or technique. Structural plywood was deemed as suitable as prestressed concrete or brick walls, as long as they performed according to the standards. Under these circumstances, wallboards were expected, as the Glenn Fowler predicted in The New York Times, to swiftly replace the lath and plaster walls that had been typical for Manhattan apartments.45 Weiner’s reference to two types of support walls in his general statement points to the specific environment in Manhattan, where he lived. In his next book, titled TRACCE/ TRACES, Weiner further generalized his statements. Published in 1970, the seven-by­ four-inch softcover booklet with a dust jacket was printed in an offset edition of 1,000.46 TRACCE/TRACES includes fifty notations, each consisting of a past participle of a verb, such as REMOVED, THROWN, or POURED. The individual notations, one to a page, appeared in both Italian and English, the former printed on the upper half and the latter on the lower half of the page. They were set in capital, sans serif letters, a convention that Weiner retrospectively applied to all of his statements.47 Whereas a general statement like A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL in Statements implicated specific materials (lathing, plaster)

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and designated a place (wall), the concepts recorded in TRACCE/TRACES left all for­ mal elements undetermined, expanding to an almost unlimited degree of possibilities for a work’s reference to an existing, future, or imagined situation. REMOVED could denote a three-by-three-foot removal of plaster from a wall; it might be an excavation of one hundred cubic feet of dirt (describing Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument) or the removal, that is destruction of an entire city block—all situations that Weiner had wit­ nessed himself living in New York City. His audience in Turin, Italy, where he published TRACCE/TRACES, will have had other situations in mind. Dematerialization/Democratization

By opening up his notations and making them more general, Weiner shifted authorial power from the artist to individual viewers, who could read, interpret, or build the work in a specific locale and within their own aesthetic, sociopolitical, and economic purview. Weiner thus stands in a tradition of American artists who sought to create a democratic egalitarian art, an art accessible to all people. Indeed, his statements were easily dis­ tributed throughout New York City, its suburbs, the nation, and beyond. They could be read, copied, thought, materialized, written down, appreciated, and crumpled up by many people at once according to each individual’s predilection. Critics at the time used the term “dematerialization” to capture the idealist, anti-materialist characteristics of conceptual art as well as its decentralizing, political potential. When formulating artworks using words, Weiner was keen that the described situa­ tion could be realized by a broad public. His statements frequently reference ordinary materials, objects, and environments that were part of people’s everyday life. Such an interest in the ordinary and the common was already integral to the work of minimal and pop artists. A pot of green paint, an aerosol spray can, or a container of bleach were all easily obtained. One could acquire them with a little money in a local store or may even have them siting around at home in a storage or laundry room. Walls, carpets, wooden surfaces, or kitchen floors were omnipresent in New York City and other places around the world. And the activities themselves, that is, removing, throwing, or pouring, were basic human acts to be performed with ease. Removing an area of plaster from a wall may be technically more challenging, but considering that the size and the shape of the removal in Weiner’s general statement was left to the receiver, the recipient of the work could decide to realize but a one-inch removal. In a 1969 interview, Weiner stated that his works were “within the realm of possibility. . . . If they were not possible to be built, they would negate the choice of the receiver as to whether they were built or not.”48 Numerous works that Weiner materially realized during the late 1960s called to mind the forms and techniques of abstract expressionist painting. For example, when throw­ ing a quart of green paint on the rear brick wall of his studio, both the spontaneity of the action and the resulting “painting” referenced the work of Jackson Pollock. Wein­ er’s work AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH POURED UPON A RUG AND ALLOWED TO BLEACH similarly imitates the techniques used by Pollock, who poured, threw, or dripped material on his canvas that he had spread out horizontally on the floor of his studio (Figure  5.8). Weiner’s performances and situations cleverly reversed the mate­ rial practices of the New York School of painters, who were celebrated nationally and internationally. Pollock, Mark Rothko, Morris Lewis, and Kenneth Noland had used industrially produced paints on canvas; Weiner turned to bleach, plaster, and drywalls in addition to paint and worked directly on the walls and floors. Indeed, the two works

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Figure 5.8 Lawrence Weiner, AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH POURED UPON A  RUG AND ALLOWED TO BLEACH, 1968, installed in the exhibition January  5–31, 1969 at McLendon Building, New York, 1969. Source: © 2023 Lawrence Weiner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

that Weiner realized as part of the January exhibition in the McLendon building, A 36’ × 36’ REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL and AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH POURED UPON A RUG AND ALLOWED TO BLEACH, were created by removing material or bleaching color, thus subverting the idea of art as a material, self-contained object.49 In the post-war era, American critics, curators, and policy makers theorized abstract expressionism as the quintessential art of democracy and freedom. The new, avant­ garde style—abstract, subjective, and innovative—was seen as representing fundamental American values, and the male, white, virile artist was positioned as a genius who had the capacity to express these ideals from within. Weiner was highly critical of the art and politics of expressionism. He was adamant in his condemnation of the heroic indi­ vidualism that played into the canonical history of Western art and postwar American painting in particular. Careful not to mistake his individual predilections and experiences for universals, he insisted: “Art that imposes conditions—human or otherwise—on the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism. My own art never gives directions.”50 In a 1971 interview, Weiner recognized that “the word ‘fascist’ is very loaded,” but he continued to use it along slightly less politically damning terms, such as “impositional art” and “choreographed art” to deride the notion of artistic genius.51 I obviously say that anyone who imposes a unique condition for receivership, for in­ terpretation, for seeing a work, is placing art within a context that is almost nineteenth

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century. There is the specific, unique, emotional object produced by a prophet, pro­ duced by the only person who can make this. It becomes expressionist. . . . I find any kind of expressionism fascist, and repugnant. It becomes a moral issue as well as an aesthetic one.52 Weiner’s marshalling of the term fascism is indicative of his disillusionment with American politics. The German American theorist Herbert Marcuse, who was one of the founders of the New Left and a prominent figure in the counterrevolutions of the 1960s, warned of the “proto-fascist syndrome.”53 He exposed and vehemently critiqued the imperialist, sexist, racist, and classist structures of Western governments that thought themselves democratic. Marcuse along with many other left-leaning social critics pointed to the US military involvement in Southeast Asia, the fraught foreign politics in Latin America, the police violence against racial minorities, the disenfranchisement of women, gays, and lesbians. These injustices also played out in urban renewal schemes, which James Baldwin in 1963 ironically dubbed “negro removal”.54 Weiner along with many avant-garde artists and critics distrusted the intuitive processes of abstract expressionism that were celebrated as free and democratic, i.e. American; he instead favored a more critical, deliberate approach to art that became defining for conceptual practices. In early 1968, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler used the term “dematerialization” to describe the conceptual tendency in contemporary avant-garde art. In their essay “The Dematerialization of Art,” published in the February issue of Art International, they explain that the new art emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively. As more and more work is de­ signed in the studio but executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen, as the object becomes merely the end product, a number of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the work of art. . . . Such a trend appears to be provoking a profound dematerialization of art, especially of art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it may result in the object’s becoming wholly obsolete.55 Lippard and Chandler derived the concept of dematerialization from the fabrication pro­ cess that many minimal, pop, and earth artists employed, in that they outsourced pro­ duction to a company or hired workers to realize a piece. A wide variety of artists are mentioned in the essay, from Judd and LeWitt to Oldenburg and Smithson. Given that many of these artists still made sculptural objects, the authors explain that these new conceptual works were both “tangible and intangible, simple and complex.”56 Still Lippard and Chandler emphasized the idealist, or “ultra-conceptual,” aspect of the new art. They insist that these artists understand their work as “a stringently metaphysical vehicle for an idea intended.”57 By preferencing idealist over visual and material characteristics of conceptual art, they removed these practices from their imbri­ cation with the everyday world. The authors explain: “The shift of emphasis from art as product to art as idea has freed the artist from present limitations—both economic and technical.” They continue: “Moreover, since dealers cannot sell art-as-idea, economic materialism is denied along with physical materialism.”58 Lippard and Chandler position the development of conceptual art as an investigation into the nature of art itself, thereby retaining disciplinary boundaries and separating art—not unlike Greenberg—from other visual and material practices, in particular those that were more obviously functional or commercial. The anti-materialist aspect of conceptual art itself was theorized as political,

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as an attempt by artists to critically distance their work from the culture industry and the exponential commercialization of art during the post-war era. Lippard also came to embrace the political-democratic potentials of dematerialization. As art historian Christian Berger states, Lippard’s perspective on what she referred to as “dematerialization” had changed con­ siderably soon after the publication of the article she wrote with Chandler. Whereas they had previously argued largely from an idealist perspective, Lippard later reconfig­ ured dematerialization as a communicative tool and a catalyst of the decentralization of the art world.59 The radicalization of her position was spurred by her trip to Buenos Aires in September 1968, where she met artists and critics who employed dematerialized practices as a mode of political resistance against an oppressive military regime. Back in New York City, Lippard became active in the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) that came together in 1969. She, however, along with other women seceded from the male-dominated AWC and cofounded the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee the following year, fighting for equal representation of women in the arts.60 Growing up in the South Bronx in a working-class family, Weiner came—to use his words—“from a background with syndi­ cates and unions.” During his youth, he participated in demonstrations and was arrested numerous times. He thus thought of the AWC as a “bourgeois” endeavor.61 Asked in 2019 about his politics and the conflict of whether art could be political, Weiner explains: No, not whether it could be political. Whether the politics were for a group, a small group of individuals, or whether it was the whole culture you were trying to change. And let’s chalk it up to the fact that I was young and I would just go for the whole culture. It might have been the wrong choice but I did it.62 The politicization of conceptual art has long been seen as an internal disciplinary development. The first generation of conceptual artists, which included Weiner and the artists around Siegelaub, examined the definition of art itself. Only subsequently, so the canonical narrative, did artists apply the premises of conceptual art to sociopoliti­ cal issues, forming what is also referred to as institutional critique. In The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (2017), art historian Nizan Shaked questions such a narrative by closely entangling the devel­ opment of conceptual art with identity politics. She argues for “the coherence of an on-going mode of practice that synthesized the infrastructural analysis of first genera­ tion Conceptual Art with a turn to overt representation of political subject matter.”63 In her book, Shaked focuses on the work of women artists who addressed issues of race and gender in their conceptual practice. Her synthetic proposition contends that from the beginning, many conceptual artists aspired not to remove their practice from the fraught structures of the everyday lived environment but to more deeply engage with and change them. While Lippard embraced the political, feminist implications of conceptual art, she ne­ gated the cross-disciplinary dialogue with architectural practices that she and Chandler— in their 1968 essay—recognized as influential. Already in her previous art criticism, Lip­ pard was aware of architectural discourses and referents that played into various avant­ garde endeavors throughout the 1960s. During her stint at MoMA, she helped organize

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the Primary Structures exhibition, showcasing the work of minimal artists, many of whom took inspiration from contemporary engineering structures (see Chapter  3). At that time, she also met LeWitt, who worked at MoMA as a guard, and they became close friends. LeWitt, as he explained in a 2003 interview, had always called his three-dimen­ sional work “structures” because “my thinking derives from the history of architecture rather than that of sculpture.”64 In the “Dematerialization” essay, Lippard and Chandler address the role of architecture, stating that it “provides many precedents for this kind of unmaterialized art.”65 However, rather than embracing architecture in its potential as a dematerialized, conceptual, and politically effective practice and upending the boundary between the two disciplines, they distinguish between art and architecture due to their respective non/materiality and non/functionality. Providing an example by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, they explain: “Wright’s mile-high skyscraper is no less art for not having a concrete expression, in fact had it been made it would have been useful and therefore removed from fine art.”66 Lippard and Chandler think of architec­ tural drawings, models, or concepts as works of art only if unrealized. The slipperiness between concepts and reality, between a dematerialized zoning code and built forms, remained unexamined. Public Freehold

The logic of Weiner’s practice rethinks private property and redefines the notion of own­ ership not only in relation to art but also the built and natural environment. His art­ works cannot be privately owned in the traditional sense of the term. A work such as A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL does not exist as a unique entity and will have many receiv­ ers, who can read, interpret, materialize, copy, and distribute it. In numerous interviews Weiner suggested that a work of art is not owned by an individual but belongs to the interested public. The artist explained: I want the art to be accessible. So what it is really? . . . See, the price becomes almost unimportant because all the art’s given away when you think about it. I go through a lot of trouble to get things published all the time. So the pieces are published, the information is public, anybody that really is excited can make a reproduction. So, in fact, the art is all [a public] freehold.67 Weiner later elaborated, saying, “In a sense, once you know about a work of mine, you own it. There’s no way I can climb into somebody’s head and remove it.” A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A  WALL is thus characterized, as Benjamin Buchloh eloquently put it, “by its innate incommensurability with the laws of private property.”68 Nevertheless, to sustain his artistic practice economically, Weiner set up a paradoxical system by which he could sell his work. In his 1969 conversation with Patricia Norvell, Weiner explained that when someone bought one of his works, that person’s name was typed on a sheet of paper that was then filed with a lawyer. The name was also entered in two books, one held by the artist and the other kept in a safe-deposit box.69 If Weiner wanted to exhibit one of the sold works, he asked the collector for permission. This im­ plies that the owner has exclusive rights to use, realize, contemplate, and loan that piece.

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However, Weiner continued, “Basic to my aesthetic is that the reproduction of a piece of mine is as equally valid as art, as the ‘original’.”70 He then elaborated with a hypotheti­ cal: A visitor to the exhibition Live in Your Head in Bern encounters his removal piece and goes home to realize the work on their own wall. That piece is just as much art. And it is my art. But it is a reproduction of my art. And it’s just as valid aesthetically as the one that was in the museum or the one that was in the gallery or somewhere else. So you run into a very tacky problem with the accept­ ance of receivership.71 Thus, when a collector or institution buys one of Weiner’s work, they own the “original,” but that original is as valid as the many copies that exist. The difference is that by virtue of their payment to the artist, they value Weiner’s work and make possible the artist’s creative practice. Receivers can engage with Weiner’s work intellectually and physically, as well as sus­ tain it economically. To this purpose, the artist differentiated between works held as pub­ lic freehold, works held as a private freehold, and those that are neither. Historically, the term “freehold” helped conceptualize permanent ownership or tenure of a piece of land in that the owner was “free” to do with the designated land or dispose of it at will. For Weiner, a public freehold denoted the broadest possible receivership. A private freehold described works that Weiner demarcated as such in an exhibition, during which visitors could ask the artist to become owners of that piece without financially supporting the artist’s practice; the artist made such works for people without the financial means to buy one of his works. In that case, Weiner spelled out the statement on a piece of graph paper, added his name “L. WEINER,” and handed the work to the interested person (Figure 5.9). The pieces deemed neither public nor private freeholds were those sold for money.72 Following Weiner’s definition(s) of ownership, we may say that a buyer owns the work but that they cannot prevent the public from receiving or using it. In a 1998 interview, the artist eloquently compared his art to a privately owned yet publicly acces­ sible park, explaining that buying something was a gesture of responsibility and a gesture of ownership, but it was not a gesture of censorship from other people not being able to use it. All my work is like a public park that somebody buys and maintains, because they have the money, but they let people come in and use the park.73 A privately owned, publicly accessible park can be framed in terms of ownership and accessibility but also through the lens of custodianship and maintenance. Conceiving Weiner’s work as a public park or public freehold questions private privileges, or at least associates ownership not only with rights but also responsibilities. In a 1993 interview, the artist recalled that “this was 1967 or something in the sixties when public freehold became a big deal. I just wanted to question it and I wanted it be part of my existence that I  can continue to question this idea of privilege.”74 Weiner’s statements and their possibility of multiple materializations elude the privilege of exclusive ownership. Indeed, by comparing his work with a public park, he thinks about how built space is inhabited communally and thus more forcefully brings out the conundrum between individual free­ dom and ethical, social imperatives.75

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Figure 5.9 Lawrence Weiner, A 36” × 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL, 1968. Language and the material referred to, dimensions variable. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Seth Siegelaub and the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam. Source: © 2023 Lawrence Weiner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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Translations

Weiner encountered the specificity and materiality of language when his work A 36” × 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL was included in the exhibition Live in Your Head. Conceived for an international audience, the exhibition had a first stop in Bern, Switzerland, and from there traveled to Germany and England. The exhibition catalog was trilingual: Eng­ lish, German, and French. Weiner’s work in German read: BESEITIGUNG EINES 90 × 90 CM GROSSEN WANDSTÜCKS BIS ZUM LATTENWERK ODER DEM VER­ PUTZGRUND ODER DEN HOLZFASERPLATTEN.76 While the phrase in English included dimensions of the removal, the German translation specified a slightly smaller size: ninety centimeters converts more accurately into 35.43 inches. It seems that it was decided that it was more important to retain a round number that conveyed the same visual integrity of the statement rather than the exact meaning of the phrase. Three years later, when the work appeared in another exhibition, the measurement was translated as “ein Quadratmeter”—a square meter—likely taking into account that in the US-American imperial system, thirty-six inches equal three feet, or a yard, and deciding that the Ger­ man translation should reference a larger metric unit.77 The translations in the catalog Live in Your Head exemplify the visual changes that occur when an idea moves from one language to another. In his subsequent publication TRACCES/TRACES, Weiner printed each work in Italian and English. In both languages, the words were written in capital letters to avoid the hierarchies between lower- or upper­ case letters.78 Making TRACCES/TRACES a bilingual publication was an effort to make the works accessible to both an Italian and English speaking audience. In a symposium in 1969—the time Weiner was working on TRACCES/TRACES—he elaborated on the “medium of language”: “I may utilize the medium in an attempt to get across only the content, in the most concise package I’m capable of at that moment.”79 He added: When you are dealing with language, there is no edge that the picture drops over or drops off. You are dealing with something completely infinite. Language, because it is the most non-objective thing we have ever developed in this world, never stops.80 Despite this embrace of the nonobjective, Weiner was no longer comfortable describing his practice as conceptual, particularly in light of his fellow symposium participant Jo­ seph Kosuth applying the term to the self-referential properties of language. Weiner’s use of language was intimately involved with the material situation it described. The sympo­ sium ended with the two artists quibbling. Weiner: You like the word ‘conceptual.’ For you, it’s fine. It fits you. I don’t really see it fitting me. . . . Well, the concept is not necessarily a conceptual situation. Kosuth: You use language, so conceptual is applicable, whether you like it or not, baby.81 Talking with Norvell that same year, Weiner elaborated: “the pieces are pretty concrete. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You know ambiguously exactly what I’m talk­ ing about—which is why I love translations.”82 In late 1971 Weiner had to consider the specificity and materiality of language and the implications for his practice anew. The Italian collector Giuseppe Panza, who had been

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acquiring Weiner’s art, hired an architect to install his collection. When challenged to install Weiner’s work, the architect suggested producing the statements in large letters on the wall. Weiner later recalled his reaction: I arrived in [Panza’s] house to look at the collection, and there was a work of mine either painted or presstype, I never figured it out, on the wall. I think I was a little distressed, walked around Milano for a while, and realized that was just about as good as anything else. It wasn’t anything I figured out, it was something that just came about by someone who was using the work. I think I was also tired of carrying these wrinkled typewritten papers.83 By rendering the phrase in letters on a wall, the words themselves became more like paintings—their color, size, and typeface were conspicuous parts of the work, and when considering the materiality of the paint, ink, or vinyl in which the letters were produced, they became objects. At this time, Weiner had largely resorted to typing or handwriting the statements on a sheet of paper or publishing them in a book—techniques more likely to convey the meaning of words rather than their object character. For his 1973 solo show at the Galleria Toselli in Milan, Weiner took up the idea of Panza’s architect and realized a number of his recently created works as phrases spelled out as letters on the gallery walls. This practice has since become the most widely used technique of presenting the artist’s work in exhibitions. Such a visual yet linguistic form has a certain degree of specificity without losing its ambiguity. During this time Weiner also created the film A FIRST QUARTER, in which numerous of his friends and fellow artists, such as Tina Girouard, Elain Grove, and Mel Kendrick, speak, read, write, paint, enact, or build various statements.84 A FIRST QUARTER is characterized by structural layerings, flashbacks, and simultaneity, techniques that reject the conventional narrative structure of film. In one scene, performer and dancer Girouard paints large capital letters on the rear wall of a Manhattan brick building. With paint dripping down here and there, she composes words that create meaning and eventually form a sentence that reads: ONE QUART EXTERRIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL (Figure 5.10). Like Girouard in her performance, Weiner throughout the eighty­ five-minute black-and-white film dissolves any rigid boundaries between words and ma­ terial realities, between pages, books, projected images, and walls. A work such as ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL registered the material, social, and cultural spaces that Weiner inhabited. Like many other aspiring artists, he found affordable living space in the neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan. In the early 1960s, he moved into the top floor of a dilapidated, three-story brick building at 13 Bleecker Street, one block north of Houston Street, working and living there together with his wife Alice Zimmerman—they met in 1967 at Max’s Kansas City bar where Zimmerman was a waitress; their daughter Kirsten was born in 1969. They renovated their space, installing for example a toilet and a hot water heater. At the same time, they worked on transforming their barge in Amsterdam into a houseboat living there parts of the year. While not trained as architects, Weiner and Zimmerman gained first-hand experience working with walls, structural systems, and buildings. In October 1968, the first art gallery opened its doors in SoHo in a reno­ vated space at 96 Prince Street, just a short walk from their home on Bleecker Street. The inaugural group show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, organized by Lippard, Robert Huot, and Ron Wolin, was to raise money to benefit the “Student Mobilization Committee to

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Figure 5.10 Lawrence Weiner, ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL, 1969. Production still from Weiner’s 1973 film A FIRST QUARTER, featuring Tina Girouard as an actress in the film. Source: © 2023 Lawrence Weiner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © The Estate of Tina Girouard/Art­ ists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Richard Landry © Richard Landry.

End the War in Vietnam.” The exhibition included LeWitt’s first wall drawings that two months later featured in the publication Xerox Book.85 Published by Siegelaub, Xerox Book included works by seven artists, among them Weiner’s notation A RECTANGU­ LAR REMOVAL FROM THE XEROXED GRAPH SHEET IN PROPORTION TO THE OVERALL DIMENSIONS OF THE SHEET. The xeroxed sheets assembled in the book were works of art. The progressive potential of conceptual art was rooted in its capacity to move beyond local specificities and transcend existing structures of power. Conceptual art was thought to easily upend dichotomies between center and periphery and cross various socioeco­ nomic, cultural, and geographical boundaries. US-American critics thought of conceptual art as an international movement that decentralized the New York-focused, maledominated art world. Indeed, conceptualism was a global phenomenon, and artists in various countries from North and South America to Europe and Asia employed dema­ terialized practices. However, the claim to internationalism was made by white, Western critics, who were in positions of institutional power to write a global art history. As Sophie Cras expounds, such “claims of ‘internationalism’ and ‘decentering’ in the late 1960s only hid—or even justified—persisting geographical inequalities.”86 Americans like Weiner, Siegelaub, or Lippard did not question their own positions of power or their con­ ception of avant-garde art. Only by historically, politically, and geospatially rooting their work does it become specific and thus political. As Weiner asserted in his contribution to “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium” published in Artforum in September 1970: “Art

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as it becomes useful, even to the extent of entering the culture, becomes for me no longer Art but History. History being perhaps the most viable tool of Politics. All Art as it be­ comes known becomes Political regardless of the intent of the Artist.”87 Thus, uncovering the various meanings of Weiner’s art through an intersectional lens does not foreclose new uses and meanings but rather brings out its continued aesthetic, social, and political power. In 1971 Weiner was invited to participate in the São Paulo Biennial along with a group of other American artists, including Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Denis Op­ penheim, and Gordon Matta-Clark. Participation in the event was controversial, as it already had been two years earlier in 1969, when a number of American artists pulled out, resulting in the cancellation of the US entry.88 Brazil’s military junta under Emílio Garrastazu Médici was committing horrific crimes against the civilian population. Not only was the press censored and free speech severely limited, but political dissidents were intimidated and imprisoned, persecuted, tortured, and killed. Matta-Clark circu­ lated a protest letter in May 1971, stating: “It is now common knowledge that freedom of speech survives nowhere in Brazil, thus returning a virtual sentence of death against the Bienal and all free public communication in that country.”89 The letter listed the artists who had decided to reject the invitation; Weiner’s name was not among them, but he, too, decided not to participate. Instead, he worked with a private art center in neighboring Argentina, the Centro de Arte y Communicatión based in Buenos Aires, to publish his third book as an English-Spanish edition. The first work presented in this untitled volume read, with a cautious tone: PERHAPS WHEN REMOVED/QUIZÁS CUANDO REMOVIDO.90 Gordon Matta-Clark Matta-Clark attempted to organize a counter-biennial of US artists in Chile, traveling there in late 1971. At the time Chile was one of the few South American countries with a freely elected, democratic (yet short-lived) government, which was led by Salvador Al­ lende. The exhibition did not materialize, but during his visit Matta-Clark created the first of his building cuts at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago. He cut a num­ ber of sequential holes that led from a basement restroom to the large central hall on the first floor that was covered with a glass dome. Installing mirrors along the cuts, the artist produced a tunnel that reflected the light from the sky that came through the dome down to a toilet bowl located in the basement restroom.91 His experience in South America during the early 1970s and his biographical ties to Chile—his paternal grandparents lived in Chile, and he spent an extended period there when growing up—heightened the artist’s awareness of the sociopolitical stakes of his practice. In his 1971 protest letter, Matta-Clark indicted the Brazilian military junta for censoring and imprisoning artists. He continued: “The latest incident was the arrest last February of thirty young architects who had dared to propose a social solution for Brazil’s urban problems.”92 To be an artist or an architect and to present one’s work and ideas publicly not only had aesthetic but also sociopolitical repercussions. Matta-Clark was an architect by training. He received his master’s degree from Cornell University’s School of Architecture in 1968. At Cornell he completed design seminars and learned about building materials, structural principles, and systems.93 There he was also introduced to the formal-aesthetic approach championed by Colin Rowe, one of the lead­ ing faculty members at the school during the 1960s. In essays such as “The Mathematics

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of the Ideal Villa” and “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” (the latter co-authored with Robert Slutzky), Rowe analyzed existing buildings by visually reading elevations of facades, sections, and floorplans, and applying to architecture a formal methodology that he derived from painting.94 Recalling his education at Cornell, Matta-Clark complained: “Yeah, that was my first trap. But the things we studied always involved such surface formalism that I had never a sense of the ambiguity of a structure.”95 While this statement has often been cited to situate the artist’s work in opposition to the architectural meth­ odology of Rowe, numerous scholars have probed the relationship between Matta-Clark and his teachers more deeply, showing that Rowe’s ideas served the artist as a matrix from which he developed his building cuts during the early 1970s.96 Matta-Clark was well aware of the entangled histories of avant-garde art and architec­ ture. His father was the renown Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, who had moved from his native Chile, where he had studied architecture and interior design, to Paris to work in Le Corbusier’s studio during the 1930s. There, Matta met his future wife, the Ameri­ can artist Anna Clark. With the onset of World War II, the newlywed couple moved to New York City, where Gordon and his twin brother Sebastian were born in 1943. After the couple divorced, Clark raised the twins, living for a number of years in Santiago and then moving to Paris before returning to New York by 1950, where she married the film critic Hollis Alpert. Through his parents and stepfather, Matta-Clark met many eminent artists and architects, among them Marcel Duchamp, who was his honorary godfather. Matta-Clark long wavered between studying art or architecture but with the encourage­ ment of his father decided for the latter. After completing his studies, he worked for a short time in the architectural office of Werner Seligman based in Binghamton in upstate New York. He was involved with the development of an urban renewal project for the city, which, however, was never realized.97 Still living close to Cornell, he volunteered to assist with the Earth Art show that opened at the university’s White Art Museum in February 1969. Curated by Willoughby Sharp, an independent curator and critic based in New York City, the show featured artists, such as Hans Haacke, Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson, who worked with various aspects of the built and natural environment. Assisting these artists, who were using maps, plans, photography, film, and language to expand their work beyond the gallery and critically engage with architectural discourses, was a deci­ sive experience for Matta-Clark. Photographs show him sweeping the ice in Oppenheim’s Beebe Lake Cut and stringing a rope below a waterfall on Fall Creek for Haacke’s piece.98 Later that year Matta-Clark moved from upstate New York back to Manhattan to pur­ sue his career as an artist. He also came to know many of the conceptual artists, includ­ ing “Larry” Weiner. In 1972, when visiting his father in Europe, Matta-Clark addressed a picture postcard to Weiner in Amsterdam, hoping to meet up. While not sending that specific card, they saw each other at the opening of Long’s work at a gallery in Antwerp, and shortly thereafter Matta-Clark was going to a dinner on “Larry’s and Alice’s Boat.”99 It was around this time that Weiner came to re-emphasize the material, architectural aspect of his work, writing the statements not only on the walls of gallery interiors but also increasing the size of the letters and displaying them on the exterior of buildings. As an artist-architect, Matta-Clark devoted much of his time renovating derelict build­ ings. Along with many other artists during the 1960s and 1970s, he converted industrial structures that had outlived their intended function into living, working, and exhibition spaces. In 1969 he and Ted Greenwald designed and renovated an alternative perfor­ mance and exhibition space at 98 Greene Street for Holly and Horace Solomon. Shortly

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thereafter Matta-Clark helped his friend Jeffrey Lew renovate a property at 112 Greene Street to create an experimental work-and-exhibition space for artists. In addition, he op­ erated the restaurant FOOD with Tina Girouard and Carol Goodden between 1971 and 1974, for which they renovated an abandoned storefront on 127 Prince Street in SoHo. During this time he also renovated a loft at 155 Wooster Street and made it his studio for the next five years and then refurbished a loft on 20th Street, just north of SoHo, where he lived with his partner Jane Crawford from 1976 until his untimely death from pancreatic cancer in August 1978.100 Matta-Clark’s practice intimately linked even col­ lapsed art, architecture, and the built environment, drawing on their various functional and formal, as well as conceptual and sociopolitical possibilities. Splitting

One of Matta-Clark’s best-known works is Splitting, which he created in 1974 by slic­ ing through a two-story house at 322 Humphrey Street in Englewood, New Jersey (Fig­ ure 5.11). Located fifteen miles northwest of downtown Manhattan across the Hudson River, the house had been vacated and slated for destruction as part of a neighborhood redevelopment plan. With the help of a couple of friends, Matta-Clark cut two paral­ lel lines one inch apart through the center of the wooden-frame house, disposing of the material between the cuts. He also chiseled down parts of the cinder-block foundation so that the rear part of the house tilted slightly backwards. The resulting gap ran verti­ cally up the side of the house and through the entire depth of the building: through walls, floors, ceilings, window and door frames, a staircase, and the roof.101

Figure 5.11 Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974. Building cut in Englewood, NJ. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner.

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By slicing through the house, Matta-Clark created what is essentially an imaginary plane that works conceptually like an architectural section. A visual device used in ar­ chitectural planning, the section drawing provides a comprehensive vertical view of a building’s arrangement of interior walls, floors, and rooms. Such a drawing enables the viewer to gain a spatial understanding of a structure without physically entering it. With his building cuts, Matta-Clark revealed the contiguous yet different realities of a con­ ceptual plan and an actual building, between an autonomous visual drawing and the material and social complexities that are involved when implementing an idea in the built environment. Seen from the outside, Splitting was, in formal terms, a simple geometric work: a white box with a dark, low-pitched roof that sat on a gray cinder foundation. Each of the four sides was covered with rows of clapboards dotted with rectangular green window frames aligned in an upper and lower register. On the short front and back ends of the box, porches with stairs extended outward. Matta-Clark cut through the long ends of the box, halfway between and parallel to the short sides. When seen from a distance of about twenty feet, the cut appeared as a thin wedge-like shape bounded by two rectangular halves of the house, one slightly titled. Despite the visual clarity and simplicity of Splitting, making the work was a time-con­ suming and labor-intensive effort. Matta-Clark—assisted at various times by Manfred Hecht, Ned Smyth, and Bernard Kirschenbaum—worked on the project from April to June 1974. They initially removed some of the fiber-cement shingles and investigated the structure of the house. The artist and his team then plumb-lined and demarcated the path of the cut along the exterior walls and roof and used a powered saber-saw to cut through wood, nails, and other materials. While working on the exterior walls, Matta-Clark sus­ pended himself from a pulley he had installed on the roof frame, slowly proceeding with the cut from top to bottom. Matta-Clark had initially intended to only create a one-inch-wide cut through the Humphrey Street house, but as he worked on the project, he continued to develop his ideas and made the opening more apparent. As he stated, “Originally what I wanted to do was just to take a cut out of it, cut through the whole thing, but there was very lit­ tle that would have been shown by just cutting.”102 Matta-Clark’s sketchbook from the time includes a few drawings of a house with a horizontal pattern reminiscent of the clapboard sidings at 322 Humphrey Street (Figure 5.12). The sequence of the first three drawings shows a development from a simple vertical to a larger wedge-shaped cut. He thought of creating what he called a “sun crypt”—a term he noted down in these draw­ ings. Channeling light from outside through the entire height of the building into the basement recalls the artist’s first building intervention at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago in 1971. In the end, Splitting did not include a sun crypt, but MattaClark decided to try widening the cut so that more light could enter the structure. He consulted with his friend Kirschenbaum, who had more experience as a practicing architect, about enlarging the cut by tilting the rear half of the house.103 Even after their deliberations, Matta-Clark was by no means certain the plan would work. Foundations provide a stable base upon which the structural frame of a building rests; altering that foundation to the point where the building’s wooden framing was suspended from its base was an unpredictable and dangerous undertaking. Nevertheless, they proceeded, working carefully and methodically. Matta-Clark, working with Kirschenbaum and Hecht, first removed a number of blocks from each side so that jacks could be emplaced to carry the weight of the house. Chiseling away parts of the foundation, they created

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Figure 5.12 Gordon Matta-Clark, drawings from sketchbook, 1971. Ink on paper, 11 × 8 7/8 in. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Gift of The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

an incline of about five degrees from the center to the rear of the house, where the entire top row of cinder blocks was removed. They then slowly lowered the jacks, tilting the rear half of the house back onto its now-angled foundation (Figure 5.13). Matta-Clark recalled: Throughout this process, there was a terrific suspense, not really knowing what would hold or shift, but the structure acted perfectly, responding to the jacks and lowering process without a groan. She came down like a dream. . . . The whole event gave me new insight into what a house is, how solidly built, how easily moved.104 Unlike an architectural section, Splitting did not provide an immediate and compre­ hensive overview of the interior of the house. Approaching the building from the street, a visitor saw the narrow front of the two-story structure and its main entrance. This is roughly the point of view from which a section drawing is rendered, but the section cre­ ated in Splitting was hidden behind the front facade. Only when walking to the side of the house could a visitor see the gap that widened slightly as it rose to form a thin wedge. To extend our comparison to an architectural section drawing, this view (or lack thereof) would be like holding a plan perpendicular to your field of vision, seeing only the thin edge of the paper but not the drawing on it. By taking a thin slice out of a house, Matta-Clark transposed the sort of analysis normally associated with a section drawing into a physical experience that involved

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Figure 5.13 Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting in progress, 1974. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner.

spatial and tactile, as well as visual perception. The full expanse of the work could only be grasped by exploring the cut over time and part by part. After viewing the outside of the Englewood house from a medium distance, one might inspect the gap at closer range, getting a glimpse of the interior and the structural makeup of the walls. Visitors entering the house and crossing the front room encountered the cut as it passed through the floor and walls, the staircase, railing, and ceiling (Figure 5.14). As the gap widened, it provided a better view of the various construction materials, their layering, thickness, and texture: behind a few coats of paint a layer of plaster, then lath, nails, some rub­ ble, and the load-bearing wooden studs. One could also see the structural make-up of the window casements, the railings, and the wooden boards of the staircase. The cut through the floor was only an inch wide, but it provided a glimpse into the darkness of the basement below. Looking upward, visitors saw through the ceiling cut into the second floor and all the way up to the attic and through the roof. One could take the staircase to the second floor and explore the path of the cut—which ran from the hall­ way through the wall into the adjacent room—step over it, and look through and inside the walls, floor, and ceiling.105 Matta-Clark also created a film, which he titled Splitting. The medium was ideally suited to capture the multi-dimensional, spatial experience of buildings in time. He cut the eleven-minute film from footage that he had recorded with a Super-8 camera.106 The film begins with a view of the home’s front stairs and pans up to the front entrance. A sign to the left of the door reads: “DO NOT OCCUPY.” The camera zooms out to capture the entirety of the front facade and then cuts to a close-up of the side facade with its horizontal clapboards. The following scenes show Matta-Clark and his team as they create the cut, chisel away the foundation, and lower the back half of the house. The film includes sequences of the home’s interior. The camera focuses on the cut, follow­ ing its trajectory from the ground floor through the walls and ceiling, thus tracing that

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Figure 5.14 Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, interior view, 1974. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner.

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imaginary plane of the materially realized section. We get a glimpse of a person walking through the house and across the cut. Matta-Clark deliberately choreographed and cut the film to bring across the constant pull and push between the bodily, visceral, lived experiences of space and the abstract, conceptual framework. The visual narrative of the film is interspersed with text panels, some being more descriptive and others more poetic, such as: THE ABANDONED HOME WAS FILLED BY A SLIVER OF SUN LIGHT THAT PASSED THE DAY THROUGHOUT THE ROOMS As was the case with Weiner’s film A FIRST QUARTER made the previous year, Splitting works in between media, translating ideas and words into material situations and locat­ ing language within the built environment. The juxtaposition of sequences that show the house and spelled out text is an effort to upend the division between these modes of expe­ riencing and understanding the world. Indeed, some of the sequences of the film Splitting are in color, while others are in black and white, and the film is silent throughout, thus further unraveling the all-too-easy separation between language, concepts, photographs, projected film, and reality. Corner Cuts

In addition to the vertical cut, Matta-Clark removed the four upper corners of the house, where the exterior walls met the roof. Each of these excisions was roughly the same size, with the cuts beginning about seven feet above the second-story floor, extending horizon­ tally three feet to either side of the corner, and then up at a ninety-degree angle for about four to five feet through the ceiling, the eaves, and the roof (Figure 5.15). Once severed from the house, the corners were removed in one piece. Matta-Clark included them in his solo exhibition at the John Gibson Gallery in New York City that opened in Septem­ ber 1974.107 Entitled Splitting: Four Corners, the salvaged fragments were arranged in an eighteen-by-twelve-foot rectangle so that they constituted the four corners of an open floorplan (Figure 5.16). A visitor could see at once the exterior and interior, inspecting the white siding, the asphalt shingles, and the green eaves, and the beams and rubble inside the walls, as well as the wallpaper decorating the interior rooms. The fragments conveyed many of the ideas that Matta-Clark had explored by cutting through the actual house. Like the larger project, Splitting: Four Corners addressed the relationship between two-dimensional plan and three-dimensional reality, between inside and outside, but these ideas became more abstract once the fragments were transported from Englewood to the SoHo gallery. Inside the exhibition space, the work’s formal and phenomenological aspects were removed from the reality of everyday life. When Alan More reviewed Matta-Clark’s show for Artforum, he complained that the frag­ ments looked too much like sculpture.108 Indeed, they resembled the minimalist objects by such artists as Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, and Sol LeWitt. A number of sketches in which Matta-Clark explored different possibilities for corner removals emphasize even more a sculptural geometric aesthetic. In a series of three drawings, he envisioned sever­ ing the lower-right corner of a rectangular shape, which—given the lack of detail and specificity—could be read as a floor-box just as easily as a house (Figure 5.17).

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Figure 5.15 Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, corner cut, 1974. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner.

The corner cuts that Matta-Clark realized played directly into concerns of practicing architects. They were three-dimensional materializations of a different type of architec­ tural drawing: the corner section. Drawn up in the process of planning a building, these drawings show the profile of the corners and detail the structural relationships of two perpendicular perimeter walls. As he did with the central cut to the house, Matta-Clark essentially transposed a section drawing into a material three-dimensional object. Both the corner cuts and the removed fragments provided a view inside the walls and also revealed the relationships between rooms, attic, roof, and the exterior, thus conveying a spatially complex form that expanded beyond the information provided in section drawings. A building’s three-dimensionality is most obvious at the corners, where flat walls meet to create a volumetric space. Architects have solved the transition from the planar wall to three-dimensional space—the so-called “corner problem”—in various ways. Mies van der Rohe was known for the attention he dedicated to the design of corners. He first developed his trademark corner in his solution for the 1946 Alumni Memorial Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.109 The city’s fire code stipulated that the load-bearing skeleton of classrooms be fireproof, meaning that Mies had to encase the building’s structural I-beams in concrete. On the facades he visually emphasized the hid­ den structural skeleton of the building by adding non-structural I-beam mullions. His solution for the corners was more sophisticated. After exploring various corner designs

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Figure 5.16 Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting: Four Corners, 1974. Four building fragments, 54¾ × 42 × 42 in.; 57 × 43½ × 42¾ in.; 42¾ × 40½ × 44 in.; 54 × 43¾ × 42½ in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Collection SFMOMA. Purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis, The Art Supporting Foundation, the Shirley Ross Davis Fund, and the Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Mimi and Peter Haas, Niko and Steve Mayer, Christine and Michael Murray, Helen and Charles Schwab, Norah and Nor­ man Stone, and Danielle and Brooks Walker, Jr. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Ben Blackwell.

in sketches, close-ups, and sections, he rendered his preferred option in an exquisite perspectival drawing (Figure 5.18). Slightly set back on a small pedestal, the structural column encased in concrete is framed at either side by a mullion, thus visually drawing attention to the central, that is, the load-bearing, column. Mies continued to modify this solution in subsequent steel-and-glass towers, such as the 860–880 Lakeshore Drive Apartments in Chicago and the Seagram Building (see Chapter  3). In 1972 critic and architect John Winter provided a detailed analysis of Mies’s corner designs. Winter included drawings of no less than twelve corner sections that illustrated the various solutions Mies had employed.110 The drawings clarify that Mies not only cut through the skin of the building to reveal the corner column but was also keen to retain the continuous line of the facades to guarantee the overall boxlike shape of a building. At the corners of the Alumni Memorial Hall, for example, the fram­ ing I-beam mullions and the pedestal visually but not materially extend the planes of the building facades. Looking at the perspectival drawing, we intuitively imagine the skin of the building continuing to the very apex of the corner, thus witnessing an ingen­ ious example of what Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky would later term phenomenal transparency.111

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Figure 5.17 Gordon Matta-Clark, drawings from sketchbook, 1971. Ink on paper, 11 × 8 7/8 in. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Gift of The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 5.18 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, corner perspective drawing for IIT Alumni Memorial Hall (Navy Building), Chicago, IL, 1945. Ink on paper, 6 × 8½ in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of architect. Source: © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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Like Mies, Matta-Clark was intrigued by visually revealing the inner workings of a building but he did not hesitate to abandon visual and formal purity over social concerns. When he removed the corners of the Humphrey Street house, Matta-Clark destroyed the simplicity and clarity of the building’s boxlike form, making it appear awkward and disjointed. The artist’s friend Richard Nonas claimed the corner removals had nothing to do with the central cut, saying, “He never knew when to stop.” Art historian Thomas Crow agreed with this assessment, concluding that if one judged the work as a sculpture, its gestalt was “spoiled by its final alteration.”112 Decontainerization

The impetus behind the corner removals was not just formal-aesthetic. While the central cut made light visible within the building, the larger openings at the corners enlarged and complicated visitors’ view of the outside, encouraging them to look not only at the struc­ ture but at that which was beyond.113 The house in Englewood was a two-story suburban home built during the early twentieth century. Surrounded by its own yard, suburban houses were typically built for the nuclear family and sat a short distance from similar neighboring houses—a series of boxes sitting within rectangular lots. The family living in a suburban house was (ideally) undisturbed by neighbors, as the surrounding yard ensured an appropriate distance from the adjacent property. This building type promised privacy, meaning protection and seclusion from the public, and came to prosper in the post-war era due to such factors as mass production and the GI Bill.114 By cutting through the architectural box and opening up the two-story house, Matta-Clark made permeable the border between private and public. He understood suburbia with its core value of pri­ vacy as a “containerization” of space. As the cuts at the Humphrey Street house neared completion, Matta-Clark explained that he was “doing pieces that would demonstrate an alternate attitude to buildings, or, rather to the attitudes that determine containerization of usable space. Those attitudes are very deep-set.”115 Containerization denoted the parceling up of the built environment along functional purposes—predominantly private living spaces versus public workspaces—as well as along distinctions of class and race. During the late nineteenth century, suburban neigh­ borhoods located some distance from the city center were built for white upper classes, who had the financial means to buy a home. The large and crowded city emerging out of rapid industrialization had built itself the reputation of being a polluted and dangerous place. With the invention of the suburbs, wealthy members of society could purchase a home to relocate their families a safe distance from the squalid urban center. Living in a suburban home was tied to property ownership, initially a privilege accessible only to white upper-class Americans. In the postwar era with the nation’s continued rise as an economic superpower, the demand for housing in the United States increased dramati­ cally. A broader middle class acquired suburban homes due to supportive government programs.116 Nevertheless, suburbs remained divided by class and race. In a society where racial discrimination was pervasive, a developer would rarely sell a suburban house in a white neighborhood to an African American family, fearing that it would in turn hamper other sales to white clients. Deed restrictions for blacks were lifted with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but racial and classist segregation continued to be part of daily life.117 In 1976 Matta-Clark remarked: “I  would not make a total distinction between the im­ prisonment of the poor and the remarkably subtle self-containerization of higher socio­ economic neighborhoods.”118

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Looking from the second story of the Humphrey Street house through the south-eastern corner that Matta-Clark cut away, yielded a view of the neighborhood (Figure  5.15). Across Humphrey Street there was a vacant dirt lot with weeds growing along its edges. Smith Street, still unpaved in 1974, leads into the distance dotted with a few houses and cars along the way. To the right a wooden power pole juts above the tree foliage. Partici­ pating in the field trip to the Englewood house that Matta-Clark organized with the help of his dealer Holly Solomon would have painted a still richer picture of the neighbor­ hood’s makeup. We can glean some of that deep knowledge from a second film recording made by Matta-Clark’s friends who joined the outing.119 The film, which has an amateur­ ish sensibility, begins in the New York City neighborhood of SoHo, where the group of friends and colleagues board a school bus that Matta-Clark and Solomon had rented. The bus makes its way across Manhattan before traveling through the tunnel underneath the Hudson River to the New Jersey suburbs (mirroring Robert Smithson’s 1967 journey to the suburban town of Passaic; see Chapter 4). When arriving at 322 Humphrey Street, the camera captures the house, its environment, and the visitors, erratically moving between them. Two African American children from the neighborhood enter the scene, looking suspiciously at the city slickers; one of the kids returns shortly later with a basketball. We enter the house with the camera, zooming in and out to focus on the structure and visi­ tors, yet life outside remains present since we hear the bouncing of the basketball. Arriv­ ing at the second floor, the camera captures more of the surrounding visible through the corner cuts. It’s a neighborhood with unpaved streets and a number of empty lots. Two kids are seen on the street playing basketball, the camera focuses in on their improvised basket attached to a wooden power pole. The changing views between inside and outside ground Splitting within a historically and socioeconomically specific locale. Englewood, when it was registered as a town in the mid nineteenth century, attracted families from nearby New York City. The town boasted an important railroad stop that facilitated the transportation of people as well as goods and materials, contributing to Englewood’s rapid growth. The residents were mainly middle and upper-class American families of European descent; among them were also more recent immigrants. The south­ ern part of town, where the 322 Humphrey Street house was located, developed during the early 1900s to accommodate manufacturing businesses and light industry. The town was roughly divided into three zones, a residential area in the north, a central downtown business area, and an industrial zone in the south. A Sanborn map drawn up in 1929, provides more detailed information about the Humphrey Street neighborhood. The eleven-block area between (then) South Humphrey Street and Haase Place below West Forest Street demarcates individual plots of land of various sizes, parceled up for home ownerships, with a few brick factories, colored in blue, sprinkled in between (section 32, Figure  5.19).120 Plot 200B, on the left side of the map, pictures the house at the 322 South Humphrey Street address, where Matta-Clark would create Splitting forty years later. The building is recorded as a two-story frame building with a basement. South of the neighborhood, beyond Cedar Lane, larger industrial structures occupy the land, in­ cluding a “Disposal Plant” and “Solo Product Corporation,” the company founded by Horace Solomon’s family that made hair care products (plot 226 on Sanborn map). During the late 1940s, the City Planning Board changed the designation of the Hum­ phrey Street neighborhood from “Light Industrial” to “Residence District.” As the zon­ ing map that was drawn up in 1949 shows, the eleven blocks between Humphrey and Haase Place were surrounded by industrial zones on all sides (Figure 5.20). In contrast to the highly valued residential neighborhoods in the northern part of Englewood, located

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Figure 5.19 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Englewood, NJ, 1929, sheet 36. Showing two-story dwelling at 322 South Humphrey Street in lot 200B, and Solo Products in lot 226. Source: Courtesy LightBox EDR and Historical Information Gatherers (HIG).

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Figure 5.20 Zoning Map, City of Englewood, New Jersey, 1949. Area around 322 Humphrey Street is designated as Residence District, areas to the north, south, and west are des­ ignated as Light Industrial Districts. Source: Courtesy City of Englewood, NJ.

at a safe distance to factories and disposal plants, the houses along Humphrey Street were less coveted. They had a low property value and were largely occupied by racial minorities and low-income families. By the early 1970s, the home at 322 Humphrey Street was just over forty years old, but its property value was considered depressed due to its history and location within Englewood’s built environment. At that time, the Solomons owned it along with about five other properties in Englewood, which they had bought for investment purposes, speculating that they would profit from these plots

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located in proximity to their medium-size company on Cedar Lane in the southern part of the city.121 Shortly before Matta-Clark started working on the house at 322 Humphrey Street, the town leadership slated the neighborhood for redevelopment and evicted oc­ cupants. Interviewed by the art critic Liza Bear while working on Splitting, Matta-Clark described the area as “substandard housing in bedroom suburbia near the Lackawanna railroad. The community here is starting to thin out, people are selling their property and the city’s buying up the land for redevelopment.”122 A  municipal superintendent, who stopped by the property during the interview, confirmed that the house stood “in the way of redevelopment. They’re going to build some modern housing.”123 The home at 322 Humphrey Street, along with Matta-Clark’s building cut, fell to the wrecking ball in September 1974, but the planned housing development did not materialize. Instead, the empty lots were demarcated as “Office Industrial” in the 1979 zoning code. Today, a warehouse building and parking lot occupy the area. When working with the Englewood house, Matta-Clark transformed an abandoned building slated for removal into art, thus presenting an alternative to the prevalent prac­ tice of wholesale destruction that characterized redevelopment schemes. Splitting makes productive the situation of abandonment to reveal environmental injustices. Countering the processes of urban renewal that were largely driven by the prospects of economic gain rather than by broader human concerns, Matta-Clark understood his building cuts not as destructive but as imbuing the still-existing house with new value. Confronted with a statement that the Humphrey Street house would no longer be functional, Matta-Clark responded: “Not when it gets demolished it won’t. But I think of it now as still being potentially functional.”124 The artist implied that, as long as it was not razed, a building had many possible functions, including its modification beyond habitable use to materi­ ally, visibly, and conceptually alter perceptions. Still, the artist’s building cuts were imbricated within processes of urban destruction, and critiques surfaced regularly. Bear commentated about Splitting that there was some­ thing “perversely lyrical” about working with a building soon to be demolished. MattaClark responded: “I don’t know how romantic I feel about it. I feel very direct. It’s just that the only situations that lend themselves to the kinds of things I do bring up romantic associations. But that’s not my intention.”125 He continued: “Actually, I’m very glad that this building was less disintegrated than the ones I’ve dealt with before, that it had a clear structural continuity, and that I wasn’t competing with erosion or prior collapse.”126 Two years later, when realizing Conical Intersect in Paris, the artist was severely criticized by urban activists and preservationists. Centrally located at the Plateau Beaubourg in the vicinity of Les Halles, the two seventeenth-century buildings that were the subjects of Matta-Clark’s interventions had been vacated and were to be destroyed as part of a controversial redevelopment plan for a cultural and commercial district that included the construction of the new Centre Pompidou.127 Some accused Matta-Clark of aestheticizing the processes of destruction and thus justifying and playing into urban redevelopment. A few months after completing Conical Intersect, Matta-Clark explained that the townhouses were in “a wholesale abandonment situation, and the nature of the work wasn’t contradicting the fact that certain human needs are very central.” He then con­ ceded: “There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be some anger. Because to some extent, [the work] also amplifies destruction.  .  .  . but I  don’t try to make destruction into a beautiful experience by any means. I think of it as being part of an immensely wasteful condition.”128 Ultimately, the artist sympathized with the anger leveled at redevelopment

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schemes that destroyed usable living spaces. At the same time, his work conveys that the inhabitation of a structure is but one function of architecture. Phenomenal Transparency

While Matta-Clark was keen to reveal the complexity of environmental injustices, he was not a social historian or urban activist but rather an artist-architect who conveyed his ideas through visual, material, and conceptual forms. To this effect, he frequently used various artistic media. The diverse iterations of Splitting include not only the sculp­ tural building intervention and corner removals but also the eponymous film discussed earlier, along with numerous photographs and photographic collages. They all explore the entangled relationship between the physical, three-dimensional home, rooted within specific societal and historical contexts, and two-dimensional visual and conceptual rep­ resentations that were so easily unmoored from the locally and historically specific site of the neighborhood in south Englewood. Matta-Clark’s work toggles back and forth between these modes of experiencing, knowing, and making meaning. The thirty-two­ page book Splitting, which was printed just as the house at 322 Humphrey Street was demolished, is one of Matta-Clark’s most elaborate such photographic efforts.129 Combining more than forty photographs, he organized the book into four chapters that chart the evolution of the project. The first chapter pictures the house before the art­ ist worked on it; the subsequent chapters show the house cut in half, then with the rear half tilted, and then with the four corners removed. Each chapter is introduced by a short text, followed by pictures of the building’s exterior: the front and back of the house and the two side elevations. In these photographs, Matta-Clark positions the facades parallel to the picture plane, thus emphasizing the geometric, abstract form of the house. Each chapter then takes the reader inside the building. Here, Matta-Clark combined two or more photographs into one picture to convey the complexity of the interior space. In chapter two, for example, he joined two angled photographs on the page so that the cut through the floor continued as a straight line across the collage. These photocollages be­ come more complex as the chapters progress, consisting of up to four photos taken from different vantage points, thus radically skewing any sense of spatial stability. In 1978 Matta-Clark explained: “I like the idea that the sacred photo framing process is equally ‘violatable’.”130 The book culminates in a foldout photocollage of the house’s interior (Figure 5.21). Here, Matta-Clark combined five photographs, each taken from a different vantage point but all directed towards the central cut. They respectively show the ground-level room, staircase, upstairs hallway, bedroom, and attic. He arranged the photos according to the organization of the rooms along that imaginary plane that mirrors an architectural sec­ tion. Like a section drawing, the photocollage is a conceptual representation of space; it presents a view that no visitor, even if they participated in Matta-Clark’s field trip, would ever see. In contrast to a section drawing, however, the photocollage looked more like a cubist painting that can be read as a culmination of real life, spatial, and haptic experiences. Here the section served not as a tool to convey a structurally sound building but rather as a polyvalent summation of knowledge one would have gained by walking through the building. Throughout the various iterations of Splitting, Matta-Clark continued to return to the architectural section, the visual, formal depiction of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, which had been so important to the methodology developed

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Figure 5.21 Gordon Matta-Clark, foldout photomontage for 32-page book Splitting, 1974. New York: Green Street Loft Press, 7 × 11 1/8 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Instruction Drawing Collection, Detroit. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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by the architectural historian, critic, and teacher Colin Rowe. The essay “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” which Rowe co-authored with painter Robert Slutzky in 1963, became an influential text for subsequent avant-garde architects. As the title of the essay suggests, the authors differentiate between literal transparency, which is based on the use of actual transparent materials—in particular glass, which was used by many modern architects for building facades—and phenomenal transparency. Rowe and Slutzky derive the concept of phenomenal transparency from late cubist painting, where they observe that artists articulated objects in a shallow pictorial space parallel to the picture plane. In his work Three Faces of 1926, cubist painter Fernand Léger, for example, rendered various objects and spaces as flat shapes that interlock and overlap with each other while avoiding any modeling of volume or a definite indication of depth or spatial relationship between forms. In this example, a shape can be interpreted as coming forward and as receding, thus the work, in the words of the authors, “becomes charged with an equivo­ cal depth reading.”131 Rowe and Slutzky apply the concept of phenomenal transparency to architecture to de­ note a formal organization of built forms with ambiguous depth relationships. It is achieved through an architect’s skilled organization of various overlapping, three-dimensional shapes, which can be collapsed onto a surface. The authors propose that Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein (1927) is a prime example of phenomenal transparency. Focusing on the villa’s garden facade, they describe five planes that are arranged parallel behind each other, in­ cluding the “ground” plane that is the main building facade. Additional parallel surfaces include the recessed balustrade of the second-floor balcony and the parapet of the garden terrace in front of the main facade. Such a staggering of parallel surfaces results in a visual effect that allows for multiple depth readings. However, this effect requires a fron­ tal and static point of view, as well as an imagined matrix upon which all these different planes are collapsed. This is best approximated by a photograph that projects depth onto a flat surface, thus functioning in the dialectic between documenting three-dimensional space and existing as a two-dimensional visual medium. Even though Rowe and Slutzky state that they “intended simply to give a charac­ terization of species,”132 they imply the superiority of phenomenal transparency. In “Transparency,” the glass facades of Gropius’s 1929 Bauhaus building in Dessau served as an example for literal transparency, one that Rowe and Slutzky thought lacked a sophisticated arrangement of forms and surfaces. They championed an approach that went beyond literal interpretations of buildings and cities to capture the multivalent possibilities of creating meaning.133 Architecture was to be a creative, expressive en­ deavor, not just a functional, literal one. In the wake of modernism’s failure, the chal­ lenge for avant-garde architects during the late 1960s and into the 70s and 80s was to go beyond the material, economic reality of architecture. A conceptual approach to architecture represented a solution to the discipline’s entanglement with the capitalist superstructure. As art historian Ross Elfine explicates, conceptual architecture is to be understood as a way of “challenging the received tenets of a discipline by focusing on ideational premises.”134 American avant-garde architects of the late 1960s looked to contemporary art for strategies to remove architecture from its imbrication with and dependence on the cap­ italist market system, ignoring that many of these artists had taken inspiration from architectural practices. As the narrative throughout the preceding pages shows, artists were interested in the visual, material, and conceptual aspects of the built environment precisely because they were thought to impact the everyday life of people more directly.

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Matta-Clark’s site-specific sculptural building interventions continued the endeavors of minimal, pop, earth, and conceptual artists who were intend on reinserting formalaesthetic innovations within material and socioeconomic situations. Garnering critical praise, his work became an integral part of the trajectory of avant-garde art. Matta­ Clark’s position within the field of architecture, by contrast, was more precarious. He initially was thought of in terms of an outsider or renegade, someone who had left, even shunned, the discipline of architecture. Only during the 1980s, as art and architectural historian Philip Ursprung writes, did Matta-Clark receive due attention.135 Architects came to celebrate his work, appreciating it, however—at least initially—not for its ma­ terialist, sociopolitical implications but its formal-aesthetic possibilities, which was ap­ propriated into the language of deconstruction. Window Blow-Out

In the 1976 project Window Blow-Out, Matta-Clark again used photography to great effect, juxtaposing two-dimensional visual images with lived realities and thereby con­ tinuing to work out the tensions between phenomenal and literal transparency. He was invited to contribute a work for the exhibition Idea as Model at the Institute for Archi­ tecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), an opportunity for the artist to ignite a dialogue with leading professionals of the architectural avant-garde. The Institute, led by architect Peter Eisenman, was a creative think tank that approached architecture as a theoretical and cultural activity and questioned modernism’s functionalist preoccupation.136 Founded in New York City by a group of young architects, the Institute was established in conjunc­ tion with the exhibition The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1967. Arthur Drexler, the curator of the exhibition, invited four architectural schools to propose different urban renewal schemes for Upper Man­ hattan. The team from Cornell was led by Rowe and Thomas Schuhmacher, Princeton University was represented by Eisenman and Michael Graves, and the two other teams came from Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Encour­ aged by Drexler, a number of the architects working on The New City launched IAUS.137 Rowe was not part of the founding team, but his formal-aesthetic, conceptual approach to architecture was a major source of inspiration, and he became a proponent for archi­ tects like Eisenman and Graves, as well as Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier, all associated with the Institute.138 Under Eisenman’s directorship, IAUS established a lively public program of exhibi­ tions, lectures, and seminars that viewed architecture within the larger discursive field of urbanism, the arts, and design. Eisenman recalled that the Institute’s programs attracted a diverse interdisciplinary group of professionals, including artists: “Painters and sculp­ tors came too—Serra, Andre, Heizer, Smithson, Judd, Oldenburg—thinkers on the fore­ front of minimalism, of site specificity.”139 Art critic Rosalind Krauss was a fellow at the Institute during the mid-1970s, when she cofounded the journal October with Annette Michelson and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. The first issue of the journal was published in the spring of 1976 under the auspices of IAUS.140 The coeditors were interested in creating a platform for theoretical approaches to art that were inspired in particular by French poststructuralism, an interest Krauss, Michelson, and Gilbert Rolfe shared with the In­ stitute’s leadership. The contributions published in October sought to bridge the gap be­ tween academia and practice by pursuing intellectually challenging discourses. Krauss’s essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which served as an entry point for this book,

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was published in October in 1979, building on the exchange between artists, architects, urbanists, and critics that had been present throughout the sixties. In 1976, curator Andrew MacNair organized the exhibition Idea as Model for the In­ stitute, inviting Matta-Clark to contribute a work. Presented at the IAUS gallery on West 40th Street, the exhibition explored the possibilities of the model as a creative tool in the development of architectural concepts. Rather than simply representing a yet-to-be-built structure, a model—so the exhibition posited—might serve a generative role in the design process or even stand independent of an actual commission in order to probe a general idea. The exhibition featured models by over twenty architects, including work by Meier, Graves, Jaquelin Robertson, O.M. Ungers, Diana Agrest, Stuart Wrede, and others. The show received mixed reviews in The New York Times and Progressive Architecture, where critics pointed out that a deep overarching theoretical discussion was missing but that some of the individual works were “splendid” and “thought-provoking.”141 Five years later the Institute published the catalog Idea as Model for which twenty-two new models were commissioned (some by the same architects) to be reproduced in addition to the ones originally shown.142 Matta-Clark’s ideas for the exhibition are not mentioned in any of these sources. They only entered public discourse in the context of the artist’s first posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1985, when the work became known as Window Blow-Out.143 Matta-Clark initially proposed to cut all four walls of a seminar room at the Institute— a windowless box of wallboard—into two-by-two-foot squares, which would be stacked in the gallery. After the exhibition, Matta-Clark would rebuild the room using the cut squares but incorporating hinges to create windows and other cutouts. At some point in the lead-up to the exhibition, he changed his mind and pursued an alternative project. It consisted of a series of black-and-white photographs depicting exterior views of aban­ doned buildings with numerous broken windows dotting the facades (Figure 5.22). Dif­ ferent building types from various periods are represented: modernist housing projects, traditional apartment blocks, nineteenth-century industrial structures, a ziggurat-style factory. Matta-Clark juxtaposed the photographs with actual broken windows in the gallery space. One wall of the Institute’s exhibition space had large windows, each of which consisted of a four-by-three grid of twelve vertical panes (Figure 5.23). According to MacNair, Matta-Clark mounted the photographs between the windows and asked if it was okay to shoot out the actual windows, at least those that already had cracks. MacNair consented, and Matta-Clark realized the work on the eve of the exhibition opening, installing the photographs, and with an air rifle in hand—which he had borrowed from the artist Dennis Oppenheim—shot out the glass panes.144 MacNair did not initially seem concerned about Matta-Clark’s shooting spree, un­ derstanding the breakage of some of the windows as an acceptable part of the artwork. Trouble, however, started the next day. In his account, recorded and published not until the artist’s 1985 posthumous retrospective, MacNair explained that “when the Institute Fellows came in, they were furious,” and that it reminded Peter Eisenman of Kristallnacht, the night in Nazi Germany when all the windows of Jewish shops were smashed. . . . If I had any inkling that Kristallnacht would have been one of the readings of the piece, I would have stopped the action immediately.145 The organizers removed the photographs from the exhibition and had the windows reglazed before the opening night. Given these circumstances, MacNair sided with the

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Figure 5.22 Gordon Matta-Clark, photographs for Window Blow-Out, 1976. Each 11 × 14 in. Sammlung Generali Foundation—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Source: © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography © Gen­ erali Foundation/Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

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Figure 5.23 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Forum, 1974, Image from THE MAK­ ING OF AN AVANT-GARDE: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 1967–1984, a Diana Agrest Film. Source: ©Diana Agrest Films 2013, photo by Robert Perlmutter.

Institute Fellows, retrospectively describing Window Blow-Out as “an unbelievably ag­ gressive act.”146 In his account he explained that Matta-Clark came into the exhibition space with a rifle at 3 a.m. while installation of the show was underway: “He was in­ credibly wrecked. He said that he was going to knock out only those windows that were already cracked; at that point I said okay, only those. But in fact he shot them all out.”147 Being the curator who was responsible for the exhibition and having to bear the anger that Matta-Clark’s work incited in the Institute’s director and fellows, MacNair now thought the work “aggressive.” In his account, MacNair specifically mentions the architects Meier, Graves, and Gwath­ mey, in addition to Eisenman, who not only participated in Idea as Model but were also members of the New York Five, whose work featured in a 1972 MoMA exhibition for which Rowe had contributed an essay. According to the curator, Matta-Clark ranted about these architects, saying, “These are the guys I studied with at Cornell, these were my teachers. I hate what they stand for.”148 In his recollection, MacNair also explained that Matta-Clark’s photographs that he hung on the walls all depicted new housing pro­ jects in the South Bronx, ignoring the diversity of the structures in terms of age, style, and function.149 Subsequent interpreters suggested that one of the depicted buildings was the Twin Parks Northeast housing project, designed by architect Meier in 1974 in the Bronx. While that project resembles the modernist apartment block pictured in Window BlowOut, a close look clearly reveals them to be different buildings.150 Still, many readings of the work have focused on the photos picturing the modernist apartment block and have

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read Window Blow-Out as an attack on these particular architects and their approach to architecture and urban planning.151 Matta-Clark never spoke publicly about the work or its fate and did not list it in any of his resumes.152 If he would have seen the work as an indictment of the Institute, the censoring of his work would have been a welcome result readily incorporated if not celebrated by Matta-Clark as a self-fulfilling prophecy that encapsulated their antagonisms. Matta-Clark was no doubt highly critical of contemporary large-scale urban renewal projects premised on evictions of minorities and the wholesale destruction of entire neighborhoods. However, rather than seeing Window Blow-Out as a violent attack on the architects closely involved with the Institute, a more nuanced formal analysis sug­ gests that the artist sought to engage in a dialogue with the architectural avant-garde. The photographs—ten of them exist—were black-and-white, two-dimensional representa­ tions of actual buildings in the Bronx with broken windows.153 Indeed, Matta-Clark arranged the buildings more or less parallel to the picture plane, emphasizing the flatness and abstractness of the facades. For Idea as Model, Matta-Clark most likely installed these photographs on the walls in between the windows, as recounted by MacNair, creating a series that alternated between photographs and actual shot-out windows.154 Window Blow-Out thus questions any easy dichotomy between repre­ sentation and reality. Visitors to the gallery saw the actual buildings in the Bronx as two-dimensional representations and thus as removed from their specific locality and environment, while they experienced the windows that Matta-Clark shot out in their actual size, materiality, and color, as part of a lived reality. But the actual windows were intentionally broken for the purpose of creating a work of art and as such were understood as apart from the everyday world. The juxtaposition between photographs and broken windows also complicated the relationship between inside and outside. Gallery visitors looking at the photographs were positioned outside of the buildings that Matta-Clark photographed; shifting their gaze to the actual windowpanes of the gallery, they stood inside the building looking out. The trope of the window, of course, has a long tradition in art history, functioning as a metaphor to denote the transposition between two-dimensional rendering and reality. The Renaissance architect, painter, and critic Leon Battista Alberti famously compared the windows of buildings to paintings, creating an analogy between archi­ tectural feature and work of art and positioning both as complicating the boundaries between interior and exterior, between the three-dimensional material world and its representation. In 1974 Matta-Clark spoke of his own experience of windows provid­ ing the opportunity for connection. Remembering one of the buildings in which he grew up, the artist said: That building was interesting because my earliest contacts with other people were not in the street, but from one window sill to another. . . . It’s interesting the spaces I remember most is not so much floors and shelter as openings onto other spaces and other people’s realms.155 Broken windows more forcefully and obviously shatter any clear boundary between in­ side and outside, public and private. They, along with Matta-Clark’s building cuts, con­ stituted a means to question and rethink existing norms. As he commented: “One of the conventions in building is openings, and the nature of openings and closings is by and large pretty set, pretty static.”156 By thinking of Window Blow-Out in formal-aesthetic

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and sociopolitical terms, the work shatters any easy distinctions between art, architec­ ture, and the built environment. Despite the premise of the exhibition Idea as Model, it seems that Eisenman and the Institute Fellows mistook Matta-Clark’s artwork for reality, acknowledging the slipperiness not only of the model but also of the boundary between art and architectural practices, in that both have the capacity to rethink the world con­ ceptually and shape that world in reality. Lawrence Weiner, when interviewed for Matta-Clark’s 1985 retrospective exhibition in Chicago, recounted that he “fell through one of Gordon’s pieces.”157 The incident, a bodily, visceral experience of a building cut, conveys the actual, material reality of the work of art in the built environment. Matta-Clark’s works, Weiner elaborated, “had to exist as a physical reality.” They also, he continued, were to be read “like architectural renderings.”158 Weiner captured the entanglement between art, architecture, and the built environment, between concept and reality that was also central to his own work. In short, he understood that the visual, material, and conceptual forms of art had the capac­ ity to change the world. Notes 1. Lawrence Weiner, Statements (New York: The Louis Kellner Foundation and Seth Siegelaub, 1968); Seth Siegelaub, January 5–31, 1969 (New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1969). 2. Harald Szeemann, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Works-Concepts­ Processes-Situations-Information (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969). 3. Christian Berger, ed., Conceptualism and Materiality: Matters of Art and Politics (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin, eds., Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); see also Eve Melt­ zer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Kathryn Chiong, “Words Matter: The Work of Law­ rence Weiner,” PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2013. 4. Frances Richard, Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics (Oakland, CA: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 2019); Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung, eds., Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook (Oakland, CA: University of California Press: 2022); and Gwendolyn Owens, “A Habit of Writing,” in Art Cards = Fichas de arte, ed. Carlos Labbé and Mónica Ríos (Brooklyn, NY: Sangría, 2014), 19–32. 5. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36. 6. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–143; and Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). See also Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 7. Oral history interview with Lawrence Weiner, March  25 and 28, 2019, conducted by Liza Zapol, at Weiner’s home and studio in Greenwich Village, New York, NY, Archives of Ameri­ can Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution. Six sound files (4 hrs. 16 min.), 86-page transcript; and “Chronology,” in Lawrence Weiner (London: Phaidon, 1998), 146–147. 8. “Gordon Matta-Clark: Biographical Notes,” Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Mon­ treal, www.cca.qc.ca/en/archives/370196/gordon-matta-clark-collection; “Gordon MattaClark,” in Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Betti-Sue Hertz (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2006), 106. 9. Dieter Schwarz, “Learn to Read Art: Lawrence Weiner’s Books,” in Lawrence Weiner: Books 1968–1989, Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Cologne: Walther König, and Villeur­ banne: Le Nouveau Musée, 1989), 119–195; Ann Goldstein, “If It Looks Like a Duck and It Walks Like a Duck, It Is Probably a Duck,” in Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See, eds. Ann Goldstein and Donna De Salvo (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, and New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007), 100–134; Alberro, Conceptual Art, 93–94; Schwarz and Alberro give the edition number for Statements respectively as one thou­ sand and 1,025.

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10. Lawrence Weiner, interviewed by Patricia Norvell, June  3, 1969, in Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siege­ laub, Smithson, and Weiner by Patricia Norvell, eds. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 104–105. Weiner references the work A SQUARE REMOVAL FROM A RUG IN USE. See also Bill Anastasi’s work Issue, 1966 for comparison, in which the artist piled the removed plaster into a heap at the base of the wall. 11. Siegelaub, January 5–31, 1969, n.p.; see also Buchloh, “Conceptual Art,” 134–136, and Al­ berro, Conceptual Art, 11. 12. Oral history interview with Lawrence Weiner, March 25 and 28, 2019, AAA [28:00]. 13. Siegelaub, January 5–31, 1969, n.p. 14. Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Memorandum, Jewish Museum, April 6, 1970, curatorial files Us­ ing Walls, Jewish Museum, New York. Using Walls was a two-part exhibition, one subtitled Indoors and the other Outdoors. Weiner’s work was included in the indoor section. See Using Walls: Indoors (New York: Jewish Museum, 1970). 15. Sol LeWitt, email correspondence with Andrea Miller-Keller, in Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts, ed. Adachiara Zevi (Rome: Libri de AEIOU, 1995), 114. 16. Andrea Miller-Keller, “Varieties of Influence: Sol LeWitt and the Arts Community,” in Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, ed. Gary Garrels (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 72–87; and Anne Rorimer; “Approaches to Seriality: Sol LeWitt and His Contemporaries,” in LeWitt: A Retrospective, 60–71; see also Kristen Swenson, “Sol LeWitt and Urban Space,” in Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965–2006, ed. Nicholas Baume (New Haven and New York: Yale University Press and Public Art Fund, 2012), 47–61; Kirsten Swenson, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Kristen Swenson, “The City in Pieces: Sol LeWitt’s Manhattan,” in Locating LeWitt: Between Mind and Body, ed. David Areford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 35–57; and Erica DiBenedetto, “LeWitt’s Locations, to a Point,” in Locating LeWitt, 147–175. 17. Sol LeWitt, “‘Ziggurats’: Liberating Set-backs to Architectural Fashion,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 24–25; reprinted in Sol LeWitt, ed. Alicia Legg (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 172–173. 18. The maximum height of the first set-back, for example, was calculated by multiplying the street width by either one, one-and-quarter, one-and-half, two, or two-and-half. The five multipliers corresponded to the five zones determining building heights. See Stephen Sussna, “Bulk Con­ trol and Zoning: The New York City Experience,” Land Economics 43, no. 2 (May 1967): 159. For the major changes between the old and new code, see Rosalind Tough and Gordon D. MacDonald, “The New Zoning and New York City’s New Look,” Land Economics 41, no. 1 (February 1965): 41–48. 19. LeWitt, “Ziggurats,” 172. 20. Charles G. Bennet, “New Zoning Law Adopted by City,” The New York Times, December 16, 1960, 1, 39; and “New Zoning Code Goes into Effect,” The New York Times, December 16, 1961. 21. Roy Strickland, “The 1961 Zoning Revision and the Template of the Ideal City,” in Planning and Zoning New York City, ed. Todd W. Bressi (Rutgers: State University of New Jersey, 1993), 48–60; Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960, 124–131; Stanislaw J. Makielski, The Politics of Zoning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 70–106; Tough and MacDonald, “New Zoning and New York City’s New Look,” 41–48; and Sussna, “Bulk Con­ trol and Zoning,” 158–171. 22. The complicated and highly political efforts of developing the 1961 zoning code to its final unanimous approval were spearheaded by James Felt, chairman of the City Planning Com­ mission from 1956 to 1963. The many resulting public plazas created a demand for outdoor sculpture and coincided with such programs as the GSA’s Fine Arts program of 1962, and the NEA Art in Public Places of 1967. 23. LeWitt, “Ziggurats,” 172. 24. LeWitt, “Ziggurats,” 172. 25. LeWitt, “Ziggurats,” 173. See also Ada Louise Huxtable, “Harsh and Handsome: The New Whitney Is Superbly Suited For an Art That Thrives on Isolation,” The New York Times, Sep­ tember 8, 1966: 49, 57; Michael Brawne, “The New Whitney: The Building,” Artforum 5, no. 3 (November 1966): 46–50. 26. Swenson, “Sol LeWitt and Urban Space,” 54. 27. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 79–83; reprinted without images and in a different layout in Legg, LeWitt, 166–167.

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28. Graham juxtaposed this photograph with a shot of a ziggurat building in the photo essay he assembled for Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 176–179. 29. LeWitt, “Paragraphs,” 166. 30. LeWitt, “Paragraphs,” 166. 31. LeWitt, “Paragraphs,” 167. 32. Lucy Lippard, “Sol LeWitt: Nonvisual Structures,” Artforum 5, no. 8 (April 1967); reprinted in Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), 164. 33. LeWitt, “Paragraphs,” 167. 34. LeWitt, “Paragraphs,” 167. Two years later, in an article entitled “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” LeWitt attempted to solve that dilemma by distinguishing between a concept and an idea, whereby the former remains immaterial and the latter encompasses intermediary materi­ als, such as preparatory drawings and models. In the earlier text, however, LeWitt uses the terms concept and idea synonymously. See Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” ArtLanguage (May 1969), reprinted in Legg, LeWitt, 168. 35. LeWitt, “Paragraphs,” 166. 36. Oral history interview with Lawrence Weiner, March  25 and 28, 2019, AAA [18:02]. See also “Lawrence Weiner,” interview by Lynn Gumpert, in Lynda Benglis, Joan Brown, Luis Jimenez, Gary Stephan, Lawrence Weiner: Early Work (New York: The New Museum, 1982), reprinted in Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews of Lawrence Weiner 1968–2003, eds. Gerti Fietzek and Gregor Stemmrich (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 122. The exhibition at Windham was titled Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner; it was on view April 30 to May 31, 1968. Siegelaub organized an accompanying symposium moderated by Dan Graham. 37. Lawrence Weiner, “Turf, Stake and String,” S.M.S. no. 5 (New York: Letter Edged in Black Press, October  1968), n.p. The drawing was included in the group exhibition Language II, which opened in May 1968 at the Dwan Gallery in New York and was organized by Robert Smithson. 38. Rudi Fuchs, ed. An Exhibition of the Work of Lawrence Weiner (Eindhoven: Van Abbemu­ seum, 1976), n.p. 39. Barbara Rose, “Looking at American Sculpture,” Artforum 3, no. 5 (February 1965): 36. 40. Other relevant exhibitions include Scale Models and Drawings shown at the Dwan Gallery in January 1967; Macrostructures at the Richard Feigen gallery; Architectural Sculpture, Sculp­ ture Architecture at the Visual Arts Gallery; and Monuments, Tombstones, and Trophies on view at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts from March to May 1967. A number of these exhibitions are reviewed in Dan Graham, “Models and Monuments: The Plague of Architec­ ture,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 5 (March 1967): 32–34. 41. Siegelaub, January 5–31, 1969, n.p. 42. See “Two Objects on a Table,” Lawrence Weiner in conversation with Jean Nouvel, Olivier Boissiere, René Denizot, and Brian Holmes, Galeries Magazine (October–November  1993); reprinted in Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews, 303. 43. Sabeth Buchmann, “Language Is a Change in Material: On Lawrence Weiner’s Ellipses,” in Conceptualism and Materiality, 173. 44. The City Council approved the new building code on October 22, 1968, and Mayor Lindsay signed it into law on November  6 to become effective thirty days later. See Joseph P. Fried, “Revised Building Code Approved by City Council,” The New York Times, October 23, 1968; and “New Building Code, First in 30 Years, Becomes Law Here,” The New York Times, No­ vember 7, 1968. 45. Glenn Fowler, “Broad Revisions of Building Code Proposed to City,” The New York Times, July 9, 1965, 1, 12. 46. Lawrence Weiner, TRACCE/TRACESS (Turin: Sperone Editions, 1970). After Statements, Weiner worked on the book Terminal Boundaries, but it was never published. See Jean-Hubert Martin, ed. Lawrence Weiner: Works & Reconstructions (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1983), 73, 76; and Benjamin Buchloh, “In Conversation with Lawrence Weiner,” in Lawrence Weiner (London: Phaidon, 1998), 14. 47. For publication details, see Schwarz, Weiner: Books, 13; see also Gabriele Wix, “Unclaimed Things/Von herrenlosen Dingen,” in Nach Bildende Kunst, Art After Fine Art: Lawrence Weiner (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012); and Chiong, “Words Matter,” 185. Weiner came to prefer the typeface Franklin Gothic Condensed, describing it as a “working class” font. The

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capitalization of words, he thought, avoided hierarchical relations between letters and also broke with the Bauhaus tradition of lower case. Further, Weiner thought that serif fonts looked too academic therefore opting for sans serif font. For this book, I capitalized Weiner’s works but used the Sabon serif font that the publisher selected to retain the flow and consistency of the running text and thus make for easier reading. 48. Lawrence Weiner, Interview for Prospect 69 (Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1969), re­ printed in Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews, 28. When speaking about his early work in 1982, Weiner continued to emphasize that all of his works can be built and that, when he finds himself with materials he does not quite understand, he experiments with them in his studio. Weiner understands such activity as “research” in the process of creating general state­ ments. See Weiner, interview by Gumpert, 124. 49. While the removal has the visual characteristics of a painting, the technique of chiseling is closer to the tradition of sculpture. Many of Weiner’s works combine characteristics that were traditionally associated with both painting and sculpture. 50. “Lawrence Weiner, October 12, 1969,” in Conceptual Art, ed. Ursula Meyer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), 218. 51. “Lawrence Weiner at Amsterdam,” interview by Willoughby Sharp, May 15, 1971, Avalanche (Spring 1972), reprinted in Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews, 47. See also Weiner, In­ terview for Prospect 69, reprinted in Having Been Said, 28. For the use of all three terms, see Weiner, interviewed by Norvell, 1969, 105. 52. Weiner, interview by Sharp, 1971, 47. 53. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 25; see also Douglas Kellner, “Introduction: Radical Politics, Marcuse and the New Left,” in The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 3 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–37. 54. James Baldwin in Take this Hammer (the Director’s Cut), film produced by KQED for National Educational Television (NET), 1963. 55. Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34. 56. Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34. 57. Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34. 58. Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34 59. Christian Berger, “Wholly Obsolete or Always a Possibility? Past and Present Trajectories of a ‘Dematerialization’ of Art,” in Conceptualism and Materiality, 33–34. See also Lucy R. Lip­ pard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (University of California Press, 1973), 263–264; and Lucy R. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, eds. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 17–38. 60. Berger, “Wholly Obsolete,” 34–36; Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 127–152; and Longoni, Ana and Mariano Mestman, “After Pop, We Dematerialize: Oscar Masotta, Happenings, and Media Art at the Beginnings of Conceptualism,” in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s. Writings of the Avant-Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 156–172. 61. Lawrence Weiner, “The Only Thing that Knows its Own Essence Is the Thing Itself: Interview by Carles Guerra (Barcelona, May 12, 1995),” in Having Been Said, 334–335. 62. Weiner, oral history interview, AAA [20:05]. 63. Nizan Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Con­ temporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 1. 64. Saul Ostrow, “Sol LeWitt,” Bomb Magazine, no. 85 (2003), https://bombmagazine.org/arti­ cles/sol-lewitt/ [accessed May 19, 2022]. 65. Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34. 66. Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34. 67. Weiner, interviewed by Norvell, 1969, 104. The 2001 transcript of the interview reads “free­ hold,” rather than “public freehold,” but the context of the sentence, as well as Weiner’s use of the term in this and other interviews implies the meaning of public freehold. In earlier transcribed excerpts of the interview, Alberro used “public freehold.” See Alexander Alberro, “Deprivileging Art: Seth Siegelaub and the Politics of Conceptual Art,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 1996; excerpts reprinted in Having Been Said, 27, and Dieter Schwarz, “Public Freehold,” Parkett 42 (Winter 1994): 48–51. The adjective public is

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crucial, since freehold simply refers to ownership, or the rights of ownership associated with land. 68. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Lawrence Weiner (1942–2021),” Artforum 60, no. 7 (March 2022): 130. 69. Weiner, interviewed by Norvell, 1969, 102. 70. Weiner, interviewed by Norvell, 1969, 102. 71. Weiner, interviewed by Norvell, 1969, 102. 72. Weiner, interviewed by Norvell, 1969, 104, 105. See also Weiner, interview by Gumpert, 127; his comments in “From an Interview by Maria Eichhorn,” April 15, 1998, New York, in Hav­ ing Been Said, 371–372; and Sophie Cras, The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 73. Weiner, interview by Eichhorn, 372. In a previous interview with Eichhorn about a contract that Seth Siegelaub developed together with a lawyer during the late 1960s and early 70s to improve artists’ rights regarding sold works, Weiner stated: “It failed in not refusing to accept speculation as an inherent part of the system.” Weiner, interview by Maria Eichhorn, con­ ducted by letter, October 1997, in “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement” von Seth Siegelaub and Bob Projansky, ed. Maria Eichhorn (Salzburg: Salzburger Kunstverein, 1998), reprinted in Having Been Said, 370. 74. Weiner, interview by Eichhorn, 1998, 372. Weiner’s interest in land ownership and staking out land already played a role in his outdoor piece STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968) at Windham College. During the symposium organized alongside the exhibition, Weiner mentions the TV series “Sergeant Preston,” referring to a popular TV series in the fifties and a related advertising campaign by Quaker Oats, in which deeds of one-square-inch plots in northern Canada were offered. See “Symposium at Windham College,” April 30, 1968, in Having Been Said, 20. 75. On notions of “public trust” and its imbrication with racist and sexist discrimination in US his­ tory, see Nizan Shaked, Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). 76. Cat. no. 118, in Szeemann, Live in Your Head, n.p. 77. Klaus Honef, Lawrence Weiner (Münster, Germany: Westfälischer Kunstverein, 1973), 34–35. The English statement and German translation face each other on a double spread, a design used throughout the catalog. The rather loose translation reads: Ein Quadratmeter WandVerkleidung von einer Wand entfernt. 78. Weiner has used upper case for most of his publications following TRACCES/TRACES. He preferred capital, sans serif typeface when publishing his statements. See note 47 above. 79. Weiner in “Art Without Space,” 32. 80. Weiner in “Art Without Space,” 33. 81. Weiner in “Art Without Space,” 33. In 1982 Weiner commented that “I don’t understand the term ‘conceptual art’,” in interview by Gumpert, 127. 82. Weiner, interviewed by Norvell, 103. For a more extensive discussion of language in Weiner’s work see Gregor Stemmrich, “Lawrence Weiner: Material, Language, Tic-Tac-Toe,” in Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See, 208–230. 83. Weiner, interview by Gumpert, 122. In the same passage, Weiner also detailed that Panza previ­ ously spoke to him about various ways of realizing the work, and since “we had had such good conversations, whatever way he wanted to present it was fine with me.” See also “I Am Not Content,” interview by David Batchelor, Artscribe (March/April  1989), reprinted in Having Been Said, 189. 84. Edward Leffingwell, “Ships at Sea,” in Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See, 277–283; and Eric de Bruyn, “Being Then Within a Context of Revolution: Six Notes on Two Films by Lawrence Weiner,” in Film Avantgarde Biopolitik, eds. Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler, and Stephan Geene (Vienna: Schlebrügge, 2009): 364–391. 85. Sophie Cras, “Global Conceptualism? Cartographies of Conceptual Art in Pursuit of Decenter­ ing,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (London: Routledge, 2015), 168. 86. Weiner in “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” Artforum 9, no. 1 (September 1970): 39. 87. Seth Siegelaub, The Xerox Book (New York: Seth Siegelaub and John Wendler, 1968); and Seth Siegelaub in conversation with Jo Melvin, in From Conceptualism to Feminism, 250–262. For LeWitt’s work see also John Tyson, “When Systems Get Personal: Puzzling over Sol LeWitts’ Photobooks,” in Locating LeWitt, 59–86; and George Stolz, “Clues from the Known: Sol LeWitt and Photography,” in Sol LeWitt: Fotografia, ed. George Stolz (Madrid: La Fábrica, 2003), 138.

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88. See Grace Glueck, “Sao Paulo Show Loses U.S. Entry,” The New York Times, July 17, 1969. For a broader context, see James N. Green, “Clerics, Exiles, and Academics: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1969–1974,” Latin American Politics and Society 45, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 87–117. 89. Gordon Matta-Clark, protest letter written on May 19, 1971, reprinted in Gordon MattaClark, ed. Corinne Diserens (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 1992), 371; notebook draft and Spanish translations in Gordon Matta-Clark: Deshacer el Espacio (Lima: Museo Nacional Bellas Artes, 2009), 138–142. See also Grace Glueck, “U.S. Decides Not to Take Part in Sao Paulo Bienal This Year,” The New York Times, May 31, 1971. 90. Lawrence Weiner, [untitled publication] (Amsterdam: Art & Project, and Buenos Aires: Cen­ tro de Arte y Communicatión, 1971), n.p. The book was first printed in an English-Dutch edition of 300 by Art  & Project in the Netherlands. The English-Spanish version had an edition of 1,000. See Schwarz, Weiner: Books, 14–15. Argentina at the time was also ruled by a military junta. Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, president since 1971, would call for public elections in 1973, responding to the pressure of pro-democratic forces. 91. Justo Pastor Mellado, “Missed Communication,” in Transmission: Matta and Matta-Clark, 93–95; Carlos Navarrete, “Gordon Matta-Clark: Sketch for an Artistic Event in the Museum,” in Gordon Matta-Clark: Experience Becomes the Object = La Experiencia se Convierte en Objeto, ed. Pedro Donoso (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2016), 68–79; Matta-Clark: Deshacer el Es­ pacio, 205; and Richard, Matta-Clark, 379–382. Jeffrey Lew, who traveled with Matta-Clark, remembers that the toilet bowl was shattered; see Matta-Clark, Valencia, 370. 92. Matta-Clark, protest letter, 1971, Matta-Clark, Valencia, 371. 93. For Matta-Clark’s university transcripts, see Transmission: Matta and Matta-Clark, 64–65. 94. Colin Rowe, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,” Architectural Review (March  1947): 101–104; and Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta 8 (1963): 45–54; both reprinted in Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). See also Christian F. Otto, “Orienta­ tion and Invention: History of Architecture at Cornell,” in The History of History in Ameri­ can Schools of Architecture 1865–1975, eds. Gwendolyn Wright and Janet Parks (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1990), 111–122. 95. “Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting, The Humphrey Street Building,” an interview by Liza Bear, May 21 and May 25, 1974, Avalanche (December 1974): 34–37, reprinted in Gordon MattaClark, ed. Corinne Diserens (London: Phaidon, 2003), 163–169. 96. Pamela M. Lee, Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Thomas Crow, “Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark, 7–132; Anthony Vidler, “ ‘Architecture-To-Be:’ Notes on Architecture in the Work of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Transmission, 59–73; Anthony Vidler, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Journal of Architectural Education 56.4 (2003): 6–7; Gwendolyn Owens, “Lessons Learned Well: The Education of Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are The Measure, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007), 163–173; Stephen Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism (New York: Tauris, 2009); Philip Ursprung, “Matta-Clark and the Limits of Archi­ tecture,” in Gordon Matta-Clark: Moment to Moment, Space, eds. Hubertus von Amelunxen, Angela Lammert, Philip Ursprung (Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2012), 28–45; and Antonio Sergio Bessa, Jessamyn Fiore, and Cara M. Jordan, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect (New York: The Bronx Museum of Art, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 97. “Gordon Matta-Clark: Biographical Notes,” CCA, Montreal, www.cca.qc.ca/en/archives/ 370196/gordon-matta-clark-collection; and “Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Transmission, 106. 98. Gwendolyn Owens, “Schooling for Scandal: What Gordon Matta-Clark Learned from the Earth Art Exhibition at Cornell University,” in Matta-Clark: Moment to Moment, 178–190. 99. Gordon Matta-Clark, letter to Carol Goodden, December 1972, and postcard, Carol Goodden McCoy Collection, CCA, Montreal. Goodden was Matta-Clark’s girlfriend at the time. 100. “98 Greene Street,” Holly Solomon in conversation with Jacki Apple, in Matta-Clark Valen­ cia, 361; and Mary Jane Jacob, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective (Chicago: Mu­ seum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 24–25. See also Robyn Brentano, ed. 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street (New York: New York University Press, 1981); “Food, 1971,” in Jacob, MattaClark, 38, and Jessamyn Fiore, 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974) (Santa Fe: Radius Books, and New York: David Zwirner, 2012). A  more encompassing account of artists renovating lofts is provided by Simpson, SoHo: Artist in the City; and Sharon Zukin,

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Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982). 101. For details on Splitting, see Matta-Clark interview by Bear, 163–169; Matta-Clark, “The Earliest Cutout Works,” undated typewritten statement, c. 1975, reproduced in Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2006), 136–137; Thomas Crow, “Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Diserens, Matta-Clark, 7–132; Christian Scheidemann, “Material and Process: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Object Legacy,” in Sussman, Matta-Clark 2007, 118–123; and Mark Wigley, Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture In­ vestigation (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, with Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture and New York: Columbia University GSAPP, 2018), 168–207. See also the following reviews and essays: A.R. “Anarchitecture in Englewood: Clean Cut,” Art-Rite 6 (Summer 1974): 4; Laurie Anderson, “Take Two,” Art-Rite 6 (Summer 1974): 5–6; Al Brunelle, “The Great Di­ vide: Anarchitecture by Matta-Clark,” Art in America (September–October 1974): 92–93. 102. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear, 1974, 166. 103. Scheidemann, “Material and Process,” 120. 104. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear, 1974, 168. 105. Matta-Clark speaks about the importance of experiencing his work by walking in relation to his building cut Circus–Caribbean Orange (1978) in Judith Russi Kirshner, “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark,” [1978], in Matta-Clark, Valencia, 392. See also Judith Russi Kirsh­ ner, “Non-uments,” in Artforum 24, no. 2 (October 1985): 102–108; and Anne M. Wagner, “Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of Sculpture,” Gray Room 14 (Winter 2004): 26–46. 106. Additional reels and footage exist; see Yann Chateigné, Hila Peleg, and Kitty Scott, CP138 Gordon Matta-Clark (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2020), 120–132. 107. Gordon Matta-Clark: A Series of Partially Totaled Buildings, John Gibson Gallery, New York September 21–October 16, 1974. The exhibition also featured the building fragment Bingo (1974) and a number of cut paper stacks. For installation photographs of the exhibition, see Matta-Clark, Valencia, 224–225. The review in Art in America gives the projected month for demolition not as September but August, which is repeated in the 2007 retrospective exhibi­ tion catalog. Brunelle, “The Great Divide,” 93; and “Chronology,” compiled by Tina Kukiel­ ski, in Susmann, Matta-Clark, 209. 108. Alan More, “Reviews,” Artforum (December  1974): 81. Matta-Clark’s building fragments are sometimes characterized as readymades. See Germano Celant, “Gordon Matta-Clark: L’architettura e’ un ready-made,” Casabella 391 (July 1974): 26–28. 109. Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe, 3rd ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 150; and Phyllis Lambert, Mies in America (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, and New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001), 306, 308. 110. John Winter, “The Measure of Mies,” Architectural Review 151 (February 1972): 95–105. 111. For an application of the concept of phenomenal transparency to other building projects, see Bernhard Hoesli, “Commentary,” in Transparency, transl. into English by Jori Walker (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997), 57–83; see also Emmanuel Petit, ed., Reck­ oning with Colin Rowe: Ten Architects Take Position (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Stylianos Giamarelos, “Calling Rowe: After-lives of Formalism in the Digital Age,” Footprint 22 (Spring/Summer 2018): 89–102. 112. Richard Nonas, interview by Joan Simon, in Matta-Clark, Valencia, 399; and Crow, “MattaClark,” 82. 113. Matta-Clark removed the glass in the adjacent windows before photographing the corner removals. Glass panes as well as half-drawn blinds can be seen in earlier photographs. 114. On the development of suburbs, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbani­ zation of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Rob­ ert Fishman, “Bourgeois Utopias: Visions of Suburbia,” in Readings in Urban Theory, eds. Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 23–60. 115. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear, 1974, 164. Containerization, and compartmentalization are terms used in Dan Graham, “Gordon Matta-Clark,” Kunstforum International (October/ November 1985): 114–119; reprinted in Diserens, Matta-Clark, 199–203. See also Dan Gra­ ham’s “Homes for America: Early 20th-Century Possessable House to the Quasi-Discrete Cell of ’66,” Arts Magazine (December 1966–January 1967): 21–22. 116. For the impact of government programs on the rapid development of American suburbs, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 190–218. 117. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 289–290.

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118. Donald Wall, “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,” A rts Magazine 50, no. 9 (May 1976); reprinted in Diserens, Matta-Clark, 183. 119. Marcelo López-Dinardi, “Destructive Knowledge: Tools for Learning to Un-Do,” MS  the­ sis, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, 2013, 27–29; and CP138 Gordon Matta-Clark, 133–135. 120. I am grateful to Marcelo López-Dinardi for sharing his research with me. He included the 1929 Sandborn map and three zoning maps of Englewood in “Destructive Knowledge,” 21, 23. 121. David Bourdon, “The New Season: Pier Groups,” The Village Voice, September 8, 1975, 123; Crow, “Matta-Clark,” 74; and López-Dinardi, “Destructive Knowledge,” 19, fn.6. Informa­ tion based on an April 2013 phone conversation between López-Dinardi and Milton Prigoff, who was the Solomons’ lawyer. 122. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear 1974, 163. 123. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear 1974, 166. The population of Englewood, which had grown continuously during the first half of the twentieth century—it more than doubled in the 1920s—declined for the first time in the 1960s and into the 1970s. See “Historical Population Trends in Bergen County (1900–2000),” data based on United States Bureau of the Census (Bergen, NJ: Bergen County Department of Planning & Economic Development, 2001). 124. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear 1974, 165. 125. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear 1974, 167. 126. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear 1974, 167. In a letter to Matta-Clark, a writer accused the artist of performing an “out and out rape” on the house. See “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark,” September 1977, in Gordon Matta-Clark (Antwerp: Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, 1977), 10. Maud Lavin interprets Matta-Clark’s destruction of buildings as a virile, individualistic act reasserting the cult of personality rather than challenging authoritarianism. See Maud Lavin, “Gordon Matta-Clark and Individualism,” Arts Magazine 48 (January 1984): 138–141. For responses, see Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, 21; and Richard, Matta-Clark, 410–421. For a re-reading of Matta-Clark’s work through a transgender lens, see Jack Halberstam, “Unbuild­ ing Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures in and beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark.” Places Journal (October 2018). https://doi.org/10.22269/181003 [accessed April 19, 2021]. 127. Peter Muir, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect: Sculpture, Space, and the Cultural Value of Urban Imagery (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014); Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, 169–197; and Bruce Jenkins, Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect (London: Afterall, 2011). 128. “Gordon Matta-Clark: Dilemmas,” radio interview by Liza Bear, WBAI-FM, New York, March 1976; in Diserens, Matta-Clark, 176. 129. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (New York: 98 Greene Street Loft Press, 1974), n.p. 130. Kirshner, “Interview with Matta-Clark,” 393. On the notion of the photograph as a material, see Matta-Clark’s project Photo-Fry (1969), reproduced Diserens, Matta-Clark, 26. On the status of Matta-Clark’s photographs as artworks and/or documents, see Christian Kravagna, “ ‘It’s Nothing Worth Documenting if It’s Not Difficult to Get:’ On the Documentary Nature of Photography and Film in the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Diserens, Matta-Clark, 133–146; and Lee Object to Be Destroyed, 216–220. 131. Rowe and Slutzky, “Transparency,” 48. See also Mark Linder, Nothing Less Than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 132. Rowe and Slutzky, “Transparency,” 54. 133. See also Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). 134. Ross Elfine, “The Dematerialization of Architecture: Toward a Taxonomy of Conceptual Practice,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 2 (June 2016): 203; see also Nana Last, “Conceptualism’s (Con)quests,” in Harvard Design Magazine 19, special is­ sue “Architecture as Conceptual Art?” (Fall 2003/Winter 2004): 14–21. 135. Philip Ursprung, “Matta-Clark and the Limits of Architecture,” 28–45; Philip Ursprung, “Blinde Flecken der 1970er Jahre: Gordon Matta-Clarks Window Blow-Out,” in Reibung­ spunkte, Ordnung und Umbruch in Architektur und Kunst, ed. Hanns Hubach et al. (Peters­ berg: Michael Imhof, 2008): 296; Sandra Zalman and Philip Ursprung, “An Architectural Perspective: Conversation with Philip Ursprung,” in Walls Paper 1972 by Gordon MattaClark, Tate Research Publication, 2017. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/in-focus/walls-paper/ an-architectural-perspective [accessed April 25, 2021]; and Dan Graham, discussion during the symposium “Gordon Matta-Clark: Moment to Moment: Space,” Akademie der Künste Berlin, April 20–21, 2007. 136. Peter Eisenman, “Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition,” Casabella, 359– 360 (1971): 48–58; Peter Eisenman, “Post-functionalism,” Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976), i–iii.

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137. Arthur Drexler, The New City: Architecture and Urban (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967). For the earlier CASE group (Conference of Architects for the Study of the En­ vironment) that met in 1964 see Peter Eisenman, “The Agency Interview: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS),” Perspecta 45, Agency (2012): 59–60; and Hines, Architecture and Design: The Drexler Years, 105–110. Parallel to The New City, a number of art shows presenting models, drawings, and other architectural proposals for buildings, monuments, and outdoor spaces took place in different art galleries. Both the urban planning and art exhibitions were discussed in the same issue of Arts Magazine. John Bailey, “Chicken Little: Destroy Harlem to Save the City?” Arts Magazine 41, no. 5 (March  1967): 19–21; “Review: The New City,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 5 (March 1967): 55. See also Ada Louise Huxtable, “Planning the New City,” The New York Times, January 24, 1967, 39, 45. 138. Colin Rowe, “Introduction,” in F ive Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (New York: Wittenborn & Company, 1972), 3–7; Eisenman, “The Agency Interview,” 59–66. 139. Eisenman, “The Agency Interview,” 60. 140. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, “About October,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 3–5. 141. Paul Goldberger, “How Architects Develop Ideas,” The New York Times, December  27, 1976, 58; and Ann Carter, “Idea as Model Seriously Impractical,” Progressive Architecture 2 (February 1977): 30, 32. 142. Idea as Model (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1981). The catalog included a preface by Eisenman and essays by Richard Pommer and Christian Hubert; see also Stafaan Vervoort, “Scale Models and Postmodernism: Revisiting Idea as Model (1976–81),” Architectural Theory Review 24, no. 3 (2020): 224–240; Kim Förster, “Die Netzwerke des Peter Eisenman,“ in ARCH+features (spring 2013): 2–15; and Suzanne Frank, IAUS: The In­ stitute for Architecture and Urban Studies: An Insider’s Memoir (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2011), 165–166. 143. Jane Crawford first mentions the events in “Jane Crawford Matta-Clark über Gordon MattaClark, Interview mit Jürgen Harten am 27. März 1979, in Gordon Matta-Clark, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1979), n.p. 144. MacNair, interview by Simon, in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 96. See also Lee, Object to Be De­ stroyed, 115–118; and Richard, Matta-Clark, 385–388. 145. MacNair, in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 96. 146. MacNair, in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 96. 147. MacNair, in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 96. Crow writes that Matta-Clark was at a party at Horace and Holly Solomon before shooting out the windows; Crow, “Matta-Clark,” 103; also Rich­ ard, Matta-Clark, 385–388. In this context, authors also recount the suicide of the artist’s twin brother, who had died by jumping out of the window of Matta-Clark’s Wooster Street studio earlier that year, on June 14, 1976. 148. MacNair, in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 96. Owens, “Lessons Learned Well,” 166; Rowe, “Introduc­ tion,” in Five Architects, 3–7. See also David Cohn, “Blow-out: Gordon Matta-Clark y los cinco de Nueva York,” in Construir.o deconstruir? Textos sobre Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Dario Corbeira (Salamanca, Spain: Edisciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2000), 77–90. 149. MacNair, in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 96. 150. Richard Meier: Architect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 128–137. 151. Marianne Brouwer, “Laying Bare,” in Matta-Clark, Valencia, 363–364; Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, 115–118; Crow, “Matta-Clark,” 103; and Rosalyn Deutsche, “The Threshold of Democracy,” in Urban Mythologies, The Bronx Represented since the 1960s, ed. John Alan Farmer (Bronx: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999), 94–101. 152. Gordon Matta-Clark Collection, CCA Montreal. PHCON2002.0016.001. 153. Eight of the photographs are reproduced in Sussman, Matta-Clark, 152–153, a ninth in Dis­ erens, Matta-Clark, 103, fig.136, and a tenth in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 96. 154. MacNair, in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 96; and Ursprung, “Blinde Flecken,” 293–300. For his es­ say, Ursprung interviewed Anthony Vidler, who thought that the photographs were placed on top of the windowpanes, but given the different horizontal vs. vertical formats of photographs vs. windowpanes, this seems unlikely. 155. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear 1974, 169. 156. Matta-Clark, interview by Bear 1974, 168. 157. Lawrence Weiner, in Jacob, Matta-Clark, 141. 158. Weiner, in Jacob “Matta-Clark,” 141.

6

Conclusion

This book is an effort to reframe the development of American avant-garde art of the long 1960s through architectural discourses. I have focused on the work of well-known artists who were closely associated with the respective movements of minimal and pop art, land art, conceptual, site-specific, and feminist art to examine their interest in the built environ­ ment. I am concerned with avant-garde art whose visual, material, and conceptual forms reverberated with architectural structures and practices that shaped the social and mate­ rial spaces of everyday life. The narrative across the chapters follows a loose chronological trajectory, but the organizing principle is not beholden to a neat, progressive development of formal-aesthetic styles. Instead, the chapters are organized around issues and practices that shaped the built environment at the time, moving from artists’ enchantment with the newest feats of engineering structures to their interest in revealing the destructive aspects of urban modernization, and tracing the shift from employing processes of monumentali­ zation to an engagement with the immateriality of architectural and urban planning. Throughout my narrative, I  show that avant-garde artists—including Miss, Judd, Grosvenor, Oldenburg, Smithson, Weiner, and Matta-Clark—were interested in archi­ tectural practices because they directly impacted the lives of people. These artists under­ stood the avant-garde not just in formal-aesthetic terms but as a sociopolitical practice, whereby the forms of advanced art conveyed, expressed, and shaped notions of human progress. Admittedly, their understanding of what constituted progress towards a better world was circumscribed by their own positionality within dominant social, political, na­ tional, cultural, and aesthetic epistemes. During the mid-1960s, white, male, heterosex­ ual, and cisgender Americans were largely optimistic, believing in the nation’s continuous progress; they benefited from processes of modernization that they thought improved the living standards of people in the United States and across the globe. Such a positive image—beholden to a capitalist, teleological model of progress in which economic growth and surplus production was synonymous with human advancement—was untenable by the late 1960s. As racial, economic, and gender inequities came into sharper focus, the failures of modern architecture, urban renewal, and civic construction projects became all too obvious. Rather than dismissing the practices that shape the built environment because they are imbricated within a capitalist, racist, and gendered superstructure, this book expands avant-garde narratives into the architectural field. On the one hand, poststructural crit­ ics and historians of advanced art have disregarded functional structures and practices as mindless or dull expressions of a reigning profit-driven capitalism. These scholars thus defined avant-gardism in opposition to the ideologically compromised culture in­ dustry, including the work of builders, architects, engineers, real-estate developers, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003295105-6

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bureaucrats. Avant-garde art gained its potency by being positioned outside commodity and corporate culture and separate from the social and spatial practices of everyday life. On the other hand, social art historians have insisted that art is just as imbricated in clas­ sist, racist, and gendered hegemonies. They largely rejected the ideals of avant-garde art and transformed the field of art history into a study of visual and material culture. Within this framework, a work of art, image, or object is generally seen as emerging out of its own time and its particular cultural, social, national, or geographical context; analyz­ ing a work of art is a means to better understanding the period in which it was created. Like a social art historian, I avidly transgress the boundaries between avant-gardism and functional, everyday structures, but rather than seeing both as replicating existing episte­ mes, I argue that avant-garde art and architectural practices are capable of questioning, reframing, and rethinking limited notions of a better world. By synthesizing the methodologies of social art history and poststructural formalism, I aim to develop an intersectional history of form. In my analysis, I pay particular atten­ tion to the visual, material, and conceptual forms of art and how they reflected as well as upended, reframed, and reshaped the meanings of structures in the built environment. To this end, I explore artists’ interest in the social and material spaces of everyday life and follow their interest to then analyze objects, structures, and processes in the architectural field, thus expanding my scope beyond typical avant-garde narratives. When we reveal equivalences between works of art and objects, structures, and practices in the built envi­ ronment, the works of art become socially and political charged; they gain public mean­ ing. For example, when Claes Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument is seen the context of the planned Lower Manhattan Expressway tunnel, the hole is not just framed as a sub­ jective, individual experience but is understood in its impact on and meaning for various parties implicated in such grand urban renewal plans, be they the immigrant populations of Lower Manhattan, artists living in SoHo, blue-collar construction workers, or the business elite. An intersectional history of form understands forms within various frames of reference not to negate meaning or perpetuate the relativity of meaning but to see the complex and ever-changing significance of forms across art, architecture, and society. The challenge I  pose in this book, then, is to think of form from an intersectional perspective. Intersectionality, which has its roots in a long history of African American activism, gained traction with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”1 A Black feminist legal scholar, Crenshaw used the term to reveal overlapping systems of oppression, explaining that: Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that frame­ work erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.2 Thus, to pursue an intersectional history of form is to unearth and reveal how forms were understood and read differently because of their impacts on various oppressed, subaltern, and marginalized groups. The impressive forms, novel materials, and structural innova­ tions of modern engineering feats do not simply denote modernist progress but reveal different meanings when seen from the diverse perspectives of women, laborers, African Americans, or immigrants. It is paramount to assess the meanings of forms within the context of various struggles of emancipation, reclamation, and decolonization—and thus as part of larger historical, geographical, and more-than-human epistemes.

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215

Mary Miss’s Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys exemplifies the various concerns of this book. In 1979 Rosalind Krauss opened “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” with a de­ scription of Miss’s work.3 Since then, the essay and the artwork have become points of origin for artists, critics, and historians keen to move beyond modernist art’s narrow frame of reference. In my narrative, I expand the discourse around Perimeters/Pavilions/ Decoys to the vernacular structures that inspired the artist. By placing Miss’s work in the context of functional, everyday structures such as the bear pit and the fire tower, we understand the artwork in its specificity as socially and culturally rooted. Establishing the historical contexts of a structural proposition transports the subjective experience of the artwork into a public, political realm. Formal equivalences between works of art and the built environment help us see how visual and material forms convey meaning, how they emerge out of a structure’s functions and impacts on the world. My discussion of Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys at the beginning of the book provides the methodological framework for the subsequent chapters. In her practice, Miss effort­ lessly crossed the boundaries between art, architecture, and the built environment. Her interest in the vernacular, everyday environment is obvious in many of the drawings and notations she made in her sketchbooks. Take, for example, two sketches from around 1978, the year she was working on Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys. One depicts an unas­ suming vertical structure drawn with the scratchy lines of a ball-point pen. Miss attached the drawing to a sketchbook page with a paper clip, and commented it with the byline “Or a sitting place (old Gugg. stairway w/seat at top)” (Figure 6.1). The other drawing,

Figure 6.1 Mary Miss, sketchbook page, ca. 1978. Ball-point pen on paper, 3 5/8 × 5 2/3 in. Mary Miss collection. Source: © Mary Miss Studio. Photograph courtesy Mary Miss Studio.

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made with a soft pencil, also shows a tower, one that is larger in width and has handrails around the uppermost platform. The notation above the drawing reads “Structure that provides a place to lay—/Looking at diving boards” (Figure 6.2). The drawings reference existing structures and their intended functions, yet the artist swiftly and cleverly trans­ forms them to facilitate new purposes. They become contemplative spaces from which to view the world differently. Miss is also central to my narrative because of her decidedly feminist stance. She un­ derstood feminist art as a practice that was actively engaged in shaping society to bring about a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable world. Formally, her work differed from that of iconic feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, or Faith Wilding, who used round, organic, and colorful forms to render subject matters that were traditionally associated with the female realm. These pioneering artists embraced media and techniques, such as sewing, knitting, and needle-working that were previously deemed minor within avant-garde art because of their feminine connotations. Women artists working during the 1970s claimed agency to frame their own positionalities as active, powerful, and valuable. Aware of these endeavors, Miss thought broadly of femi­ nist art, one not beholden to stylistic or symbolic characteristics but one that employed visual, material, and conceptual forms to participate in the construction of a just and inclusive society. In 1977, Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven organized the exhibition “What Is Feminist Art” in Los Angeles. As Iskin recounts, “the organizers did

Figure 6.2 Mary Miss, sketchbook page, ca. 1978. Pencil and ball-point pen on paper, 3 5/8 × 5 2/3 in. Mary Miss collection. Source: © Mary Miss Studio. Photograph courtesy Mary Miss Studio.

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not think of feminist art as a style, but rather as art produced by feminists, made with feminist goals, or more generally inspired by feminism.”4 Along with many other women artists during the 1970s, including Betsy Demon, Ag­ nes Denes, Nancy Holt, Patricia Johanson, and Harriet Feigenbaum, Miss collaborated with architects, engineers, planners, and developers to create works of art. They built site-specific sculptures and parks and shaped the built and natural environment. Scholars have positioned these practices within the then-emerging discourse of ecofeminism that united the growing public concern for the natural environment with the feminist move­ ment. Ecofeminist theorists, activists, and artists pursued the mutual emancipation of women and nature, which were suppressed, exploited, and brutalized under patriarchy. They vehemently critiqued the white, masculinist, anthropocentric subjugation of the earth and the extraction of natural resources for economic gain, advocating instead for a caring relationship with the natural world. Ecofeminism aims to undo the parallel privi­ leging of men over women and of culture over nature.5 This book focused on artists who engaged with the built environment, which gener­ ally is thought of as an act of cultivation—humans asserting and imposing their power over the earth and dominating the natural world. Framing my narrative through a femi­ nist, socially progressive lens, I  question the dichotomy between the built and natural environments. Indeed, the close association of women and nature in ecofeminism risks redoubling gendered binaries in which the male stance is framed as active, dominant, and aggressive, while women—and by extension nature—are thought as passive, intuitive, and caring.6 Within this traditional framework, women are associated with a natural state of purity that is emotional and empathetic rather than rational and productive. En­ vironmentalists and ecofeminists have frequently positioned nature as inherently life sus­ taining, harmonious, and beautiful and pursued reclamation and preservation projects that recovered an original state of nature. Such a conception, as art historian Kelly Baum asserted, “is deeply problematic, most importantly because it mystifies the domination of women and nature and depoliticizes both feminism and environmentalism.”7 Feminism is political. It actively and consciously shapes public discourse. One of the main achievements of second-wave feminism is the upending of a naturalized conception of “woman” and revealing it as socially constructed. This book aims to further undo the gendered essentializing of the male/female and the culture/nature binaries by framing the work of the artists under discussion through a feminist, intersectional lens. In this regard, I follow in the footsteps of ecofeminist scholar Val Plumwood, who stressed in her influ­ ential 1993 book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature that critiquing the dominant forms of reason which embody the master identity and oppose themselves to the sphere of nature does not imply abandoning all forms of rea­ son, science and individuality. Rather, it involves their redefinition or reconstruction in less oppositional and hierarchical ways.8 Plumwood—along with other ecofeminist and feminist science scholars, including Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and Elizabeth Grosz—does not dismiss rational thought, the use of technologies, and the benefits of culture but rather sees them through an ethics and politics of mutuality.9 Miss, like the other artists discussed in this book, took an interest in architectural practices because they were thought to more directly shape the social and material spaces of everyday life. Indeed, when it comes to building a better world, many Americans

218

Conclusion

valued—and continue to value—functional structures, efficient materials, and innova­ tive technologies more highly than works of art. Art is frequently seen as useless, even wasteful. And yet, as the preceding chapters show, works of art are just as central as the built environment in shaping and rethinking a better world. This book charts the work of artists who purposively engaged with architectural discourses in order to insist on the value of art. Notes 1. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Cri­ tique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (January 1, 1989): 139–67. 2. Interview with Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later,” Columbia Law School, June  8, 2017, www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/ kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later [accessed May 11, 2022]. 3. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44; re­ printed in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 276–290. 4. Ruth E. Iskin, “Feminism, Exhibitions and Museums in Los Angeles, Then and Now,” Wom­ an’s Art Journal 37, no. 1 (2016): 16. 5. Françoise d’Eaubonne, Feminism or Death: How the Women’s Movement Can Save the Planet, transl. Ruth Hottell (New York: Verso, 2022); see also Earthkeeping/Earthshaking: Femi­ nism & Ecology, Heresies # 13, vol. 4, no. 1 (1981). 6. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, eds., Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 2014). 7. Kelly C. Baum, “Earthkeeping, Earthshaking,” in Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, ed. Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swenson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 111–12. 8. Valerie Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993), 4. 9. Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Pres, 2016); Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Sandra Harding, Objectiv­ ity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure; and n indicates a note on the corresponding page. Art works appear individually and at the end of the artists’ index entries. 7 Sculptors (exhibition) 84n8, 86n70, 122, 149n95, 240 14 Sculptors: The Industrial Edge (exhibition) 71, 90n131 Abstract Bodies (Getsy) 18n9, 115, 148n74 abstract expressionism 27–29, 31, 34n28, 34n31, 34n33, 35n36, 45–47, 58–59, 96, 171–172 abstraction (abstract art) 5, 28, 35n39, 46, 63; and avant-garde 26, 47–48 Accidental Possibilities of the City, The (Smith)17n5, 35n45, 96, 144n8, 146n31, 147n59, 148n65 Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee 6, 173 Adorno, Theodor 26, 34n24, 34n25 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno) 26, 34n25 Albers, Josef 22, 25, 35n42 Alberti, Leon Battista 203 Aldiss, Brian 122 allegory 45, 121 Allied Plastics 39, 53, 84n8 “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd” (Krauss) 8, 74, 90n135, 90n136, 90n137, 90n138, 90n150 Alumni Memorial Hall 188–189, 190 American art 3, 18n11, 28, 37, 45, 47, 58, 60, 72, 79, 103, 123 American regionalism 45 American Sculpture of the Sixties (exhibition) 63, 72, 80, 88n99, 92n172 Ammann, Othmar 36, 126 AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH (Weiner) 170, 171 AN AMOUNT OF PAINT (Weiner) 167, 168 Andre, Carl 166 Applin, Jo 18n9, 99, 103, 145n17, 146n30 Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art) 20 Arc de Triomphe 106, 107, 107 Architectural Iron Works 132, 152n135

Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, The (Banham) 67, 89n116 Arndt, Gertrud 22, 22, 23 “Art and Architecture” (Judd) 2, 15, 32n6, 88n95, 119, 155–156, 164–165, 174, 181, 199, 204, 214 Art and Architecture of Ancient America, The (Kubler) 140, 153n155, 153n158 Art for the City (exhibition) 81, 92n176 Artforum (journal) 75, 77, 119, 122–123, 159, 163, 179 “Artists and Politics, The” (Artforum) 179, 208n86 Arts Magazine (journal) 40, 47, 51, 77, 88n85, 159, 160, 212n137 Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) 173 Asher, Michael 156 autonomy of art 15, 26–27, 95; and Frankfurt School 26–27; and Greenberg 27 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (Greenberg) 34n26, 47 avant-garde 1–8, 10, 14–15, 20–22, 24–28, 31–32, 37, 46–47, 52–53, 58–59, 75, 81, 83, 95–96, 111–112, 119, 121–123, 125, 128, 134, 139, 144, 155–156, 159, 172, 179, 181, 198–199, 203, 213–214, 216; and abstraction 26, 47–48; critical avant-garde 5, 11, 15, 213; and figurative art 4, 26, 47; and fascism 4, 25–26; formal-aesthetic avant-garde 4–5, 8, 15, 32, 47, 180, 213; stylistic movements 3–4, 156–157, 213 Aycock, Alice 8 Badger, Daniel D. 132, 133 Baldwin, James 172 Banham, Reyner 45, 67 Barry, Robert 158, 166–167, 168 Barthes, Roland 127, 150n113 Bauhaus 15; curriculum 21; director’s office 23; gender equality and 22; goals of 15;

246

Index

industrial production 22–24, 33n14;

international avant-garde and 25; literal

transparency 198; manifesto 20; Nazis and

25

Baumhoff, Anja 22, 32n2, 33n8, 33n10 Baum, Kelly 217, 218n7 Baziotes, William 29

Bear, Liza 195

bear pit 1, 5, 10–12, 215

beaux-arts architecture 16, 94, 101, 132;

city planning 106; Ellis Island Immigration

Station 99; Judd on 40; Pennsylvania Station

94

Beebe Lake Cut, (Oppenheim) 181

Bell, Larry 58, 67

Bengston, Billy A 58

Benjamin, Walter 26

Benton, Thomas Hart 28, 45

Berger, Christian 156, 173

Bernstein Brothers 39, 53, 55, 83n6

Bingham Canyon Open Pit Copper Mine 132,

143

Bladen, Ronald 61, 65, 80

Blake, Peter 28, 29, 29

Block of Concrete (Oldenburg) 104, 105,

106–107, 111–112, 115

Bochner, Mel 149n98, 153n163, 168

Boettger, Suzaan 95, 114

Bogardus, James 132

Bois, Yves-Alain 27

Bonin, Vincent 156

Boring & Tilton 99, 101

Bourdon, David 61, 71, 77

Brand, Marianne 22

Brearley, Harry 54

Breuer, Marcel 22, 24–25, 29, 162

Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, The

(Duchamp) 128

bridges 15, 36, 71; and battleship-gray 69;

cable-stayed bridges 54; George Washington

Bridge 124, 126, 126; and Moses 82;

and red lead primer 69; Schwandbach

Bridge 51–52; suspension bridges 36,

54, 69, 138; Theodor Heuss Bridge 48,

49, 52, 52, 54; and Twentieth Century

Engineering (exhibition) 48, 49, 51–52, 82;

Union Avenue Bridge 120, 122, 125–126;

Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge 36, 36, 69, 82,

89n122

Bridge Monument Showing Wooden

Sidewalks, The (Smithson) 120

Brillo Boxes (Warhol) 47

Buchloh, Benjamin 4, 34n25, 156

Buchmann, Sabeth 169

Bunshaft, Gordon 59–60, 110, 131

Burwell, Lee 43

Butler, Judith 10

cadmium red 47–48 Calder, Alexander 81

Camera Lucida (Barthes) 127

Canal Street 106, 108, 115

“Cantilevered Rainbow, The” (Bourdon) 71

cast iron 8

Cathedral (Feininger) 21

Catherwood, Frederick 141–143, 142

cenotaph 114, 148n70 Chandler, John 156, 172–174 Chave, Anna 76

Chicago, Judy 117, 153n166, 216

Clark, Anna 181

Cleopatra’s Needle 113, 114, 148n70

Coe, Michael 141

Coe, Ralph 46

Complete Writings (Judd) 40, 54

conceptual architecture 198

conceptual art 4, 17, 77, 139, 154–157,

159, 166, 167–168, 172, 173, 177–178,

199, 214; and architecture 174, 199;

and dematerialization 170–174; global

conceptualism 179; institutional critique

156, 173; and LeWitt 159, 162–166; and

Lippard 172–174; and materiality 156, 174,

177–178; and minimal art 77–78, 167, 170;

ultra-conceptual 172; and zoning resolutions

154–155, 162, 164

Concrete Atlantis, A (Banham) 67

Conical Intersect (Matta-Clark) 195

containerization 191, 210n115 Coplans, John 55–56 corner cuts 187–188, 192

corner problem 188

countermonument 114

Cras, Sophie 179

Crawford, Jane 182

Crenshaw, Kimberlé 214

Crow, Thomas 191

“Crystal Land” (Smithson) 122

Curtiss, Louis 41

Dauman, Henri 69

Day-Glo paints 54

de-architecturization 139, 140

Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs) 110

“Death of the Monument, The” (Mumford)

106, 146n43

de Blois, Natalie 59–60

decontainerization 191–196

de Kooning, Willem 64

“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and

Sex” (Crenshaw) 214, 218n1

dematerialization 156, 170–174

“Dematerialization of Art, The” (Lippard and

Chandler) 172

Index democratization 170–174 Demon, Betsy 217 Denes, Agnes 217 Desert, The (Smithson) 129–130, 130 Dez Dam (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam) 36, 48, 49, 50 Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 26 Disappearance of Objects, The (Shannon) 39 di Suvero, Mark 64, 69–70, 81, 89n122, 90n129 Doss, Erika 28 Drexler, Arthur 15, 36, 48, 50–51, 53, 59–60, 118, 131, 199 Duchamp, Marcel 122, 128, 149n101, 150n103, 181 Dwan, Virginia 63, 71–72, 135, 143 Dwan Gallery 63, 72, 72, 73, 76 earth art see land art Earth Art (exhibition) 181 earthwords 121 earthworks 48, 95, 118; and LOMEX 116–118, and Bingham Canyon Open Pit Copper Mine 143; see also land art Earthworks (Aldis) 121 Earthworks (Boettger) 95 ecofeminism 217 Edelson, Mary Beth 6 Ehninger, Eva 31 Eisenman, Peter 199–200, 202, 204 Elfine, Ross 198, 211n134 Ellis Island 99–104, 115, 145n23 engineered romanticism 71 Englewood 182, 182, 185, 187, 191–192, 193, 194–196; see also Splitting (Matta-Clark) “Entropy and the New Monuments” (Smithson) 122 Environments, Situations, Spaces (exhibition) 31 expressionism 171–172; see also abstract expressionism fascism 25, 27–28, 170, 172 Feigenbaum, Harriet 217 Feininger, Lyonel 21, 21, 24, 32n6 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Plumwood) 217, 218n8 Feminist art 5–7, 18n16, 117, 213, 216–217 feminism 6, 7, 217; see also women figurative art 4, 28, 32, 34n33, 47; see also representational art figurative memorials 98, 103, 125 Finch, Julie 41, 43, 45, 84n17, 122, 133, 152n136 FIRST QUARTER, A (Weiner) 178, 179, 187 Fitch, James Marston 134, 152

247

floor area ratio (FAR) 161–162, 161 Forakis, Peter 67 Forgács, Éva 33n15, 33n22 formal-aesthetic avant-garde see avant-garde formalism 5, 27, 40; and architecture 156, 180–181; see also poststructural formalism Foster, Hal 4 Fotodeath (Oldenburg) 99, 145n19 Fountain (Duchamp) 122 Fountain Monument, The (Smithson) 122, 128 Frankfurt School 26–27 freehold see public freehold Frick, Childs 1, 11–12, 11 Frick, Henry Clay 11, 19n32 Friedman, Martin 71 Fried, Michael 47 Fuchs, Rudi 167 Fuller, Buckminster 50, 53–54 functionalism 25, 60, 67, 69, 199; functionalist style 28; quasi-functional 8, 47 Gannon, Todd 67, 89n117 Gelmeroda III (Feininger) 21 George Washington Bridge 124, 126, 126 Gesamtkunstwerk 20 Getsy, David 115 Gilbert, Cass 126 Girouard, Tina 178, 179, 182 Gluck, Nathan 47 Glueck, Grace 79, 81 Goldsmith, Myron 65–66, 65 Goodman, Percival 106–107 Gottlieb, Adolph 29 Graham, Dan 87n79, 146n28, 149n98, 159, 163, 180; see also John Daniels Gallery grain elevators 43–45, 60 Grate (Miss) 7, 8 Graves, Michael 199–200, 202 Great Pipe Monument, The (Smithson) 122 Greenberg, Clement 26–28, 34n26, 34n33, 35n36, 35n39, 47–48, 65, 88n99, 172 Green Gallery 40, 41, 45, 47, 55, 77, 85n44 Green, Samuel 81, 93n176, 93n177, 111–112 Greenwich Village 131–132, 143 Gropius, Walter 20–22, 23, 24–26, 28, 32n2, 33n8, 33n22, 44, 84n29, 151n29 Grosvenor, Robert 3, 15–16, 36–38, 61–79, 80–83; Art of the City (exhibition) 81; and bridges 69, 70, 71; and di Suvero 64, 69, 71, 89n122; and Dwan 71–73, 72, 73; lived illusion 75; Lippard on 36, 65, 71, 80; McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope 65–68; and medium specificity 38, 63, 79; and minimal art 3, 16, 38, 61–63, 74; models 62, 79, 81, 82; and opticality 63, 65; and painting 63, 64, 65, 67, 75–76; and Park Place Gallery 63, 64, 69, 75; phenomenology of space

248

Index

73–79; and photography 77–79; training 64; Primary Structures (exhibition) 79–83; on yellow 69; Model for a Large Ceiling Piece 72, 81; Niaruna 64–65, 64, 69; Tenerife 71, 71–72, 76, 78; Topanga 61, 62, 63–66, 68–71, 75–77; Transoxiana 16, 38, 61, 62, 63–64, 69–71, 70, 75–76; Untitled 82, 83; Untitled, Black 63; Untitled (yellow) 63, 71–74, 72, 73, 76, 82, 83 Grosz, Elizabeth 217, 218n9 Grove, Elain 33n21, 178 Guggenheim, Peggy 29, 30 Guilbaut, Serge 27, 34n28, 35n37, 85n40 Gwathmey, Charles 199, 202 Haacke, Hans 156, 181 Hamill, Sarah 10, 19n24, 19n25, 19n26, 92n158 Hammond, Harmony 6 happenings 31, 96, 99 Haraway, Donna 217 Harbor Freeway 82 Harding, Sandra 217 Hart-Celler Act 101 Haynes, Elwood 54 Haywood, Robert 114 Hecht, Manfred 183 Heckscher, August 112 Hejduk, John 199 Helm, Dörte 22, 33n11 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple 63, 75 Heresies Collective 6–7 Heresies (journal) 6–7 Higgins, Edward 81 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 24 historic preservation see preservation (historic preservation) Historic Sites Act 132 Hitler, Adolf 25 Hochdörfer, Achim 96, 144n7, 147n61 Holt, Nancy 8, 122, 135, 143, 151n129, 217 Hooton, Bruce 45–46, 58 Hopper, Edward 46 Hopps, Walter 58 Horkheimer, Max 26, 34n24 Hotel Palenque (Smithson) 95, 135, 136, 137–140, 138, 143 Hoving, Thomas 112 Huebler, Douglas 158 Huot, Robert 178 Huxtable, Ada Louise 79 IAUS see Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) Idea as Model (exhibition) 199–200, 202–204, 212n142 Ideal Museum (Blake and Pollock) 28, 29

illusion 48, 56, 68, 75–76; lived illusion 74–75 illusionism 75 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act) 145n21; see also Hart-Cellar Act “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” (Smithson) 141–142, 153 Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (Stephens) 141, 142 Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (Stephens) 141, 153n160 industrial buildings 44–45, 50, 132, 134; and SoHo 132, 134 industrial production 22–24; and Judd 56, 90n129 Injun (Oldenburg) 99, 145n19 Institute of Social Research 26; see also Frankfurt School Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) 199, 202, 212n137, 212n142; Idea as Model (exhibition) 199–200; and Krauss 199 intersectional history of form 2, 4, 15, 214 intersectionality 214 Irwin, Robert 58, 67 Iskin, Ruth 18n17, 216, 218n4 Itten, Johannes 21, 24 Jacobs, Jane 110, 131, 133 Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes (journal) 44 Jaskot, Paul 25 Jensen, Myles Patrick 46 Johanson, Patricia 217 John Daniels Gallery 55, 87n79; see also Dan Graham Johns, Jasper 31 Johnson, Lyndon B. 101–102 Johnson, Philip 29–30, 59, 61, 86n52, 106, 125, 131 Johnson-Reed Act 145n21 Judd, Donald 3, 10, 15–16, 36–38, 39–60, 81, 213; on architecture 52, 88n95; and American art 37, 39, 45–46, 47–48, 56, 58–59, 60; and bridges 37, 52, 55; and conceptual art 168, 172; and contemporaneity 37, 39, 46–47, 48, 56–57; on engineering 52; Fried on 48; Green Gallery 41, 45, 47; “Kansas City Report” 39–46, 48, 56, 59, 79, 121; Krauss on 9–10, 74–75; and minimal art 3, 16, 37, 39, 47, 56; on Oldenburg 114; on plexiglass 57; and pop art 37, 40, 46–48; “Specific Objects” 39, 56, 57; specific objects 37, 56–61; and Smithson 54, 122, 126, 149n98; and SoHo 133; turnbuckle boxes 38, 39, 53–56, 55, 57, 57, 61, 87n79; review of Twentieth Century Engineering 48–52, 56; untitled

Index (DSS 39) (Judd) 40, 41; untitled (DSS 42) (Judd) 48; untitled (DSS 53) (Judd) 57, 57; untitled (DSS 58) (Judd) 38–40, 38, 53–56, 55, 56, 57, 87n79; untitled (DSS 83) 55; untitled (DSS 84) 74, 74 Kandinsky, Wassily 21, 24, 26 “Kansas City Report” (Judd) 39–40, 45–46, 48, 56, 59, 79, 121 Kaprow, Allan 31, 96 Kendrick, Mel 178 Kennecott Copper Corporation 143 Kennedy, John F. 68, 101, 145n26 Kirschenbaum, Bernard 183 kitsch 27, 30 Klee, Paul 21, 24, 26 Kline, Franz 47 Kootz, Samuel 29 Koss, Juliet 20, 32n3 Kosuth, Joseph 158, 177 Kozloff, Joyce 6 Kramer, Hilton 79 Krauss, Richard 75 Krauss, Rosalind 1, 4, 8–9, 63, 74–76, 215 Kristallnacht 200 Kubler, George 86n66, 140–141 LACMA see Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) land art (earth art) 2, 5, 16, 19n24, 95, 144n3, 152n145, 156 landmarks 101, 131; Landmarks Preservation Commission (New York) 94, 101, 131–132; National Historic Landmarks 132; and Primary Structures 79; and SoHo 134; and Twentieth Century Engineering 79; see also preservation (historic preservation) Landmarks Preservation Commission (New York) 94, 101, 131–132, 151n130, 151n131, 152n132 language 177, 181 lead tetroxide paint 69 Le Corbusier 28, 43–44, 44, 75, 97, 126, 133, 162, 181, 198 “Legacy of Jackson Pollock, The” (Kaprow) 31 Léger, Fernand 198 Lever House 59–60, 162 Levy, Matthew 76, 91n149 Lewis, Morris 170 LeWitt, Sol 17, 65, 149n98, 155, 159; and architecture 159, 174; and dematerialization 172; Empire State Building 165; and Lippard 174; and zoning resolutions (New York City) 160–163; “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” 163, 165; “Sentences on Conceptual Art” 206n34; wall drawings 178; and

249

Weiner 159, 166, 169; in Xerox Book (Siegelaub) 179; “Ziggurats” 159, 160–165, 160; Serial Project #1 (ABCD) 163–165, 164 Lichtenstein, Roy 46 Lindsay, John 112, 117–118, 134 Lippard, Lucy 6, 8, 37, 47–48, 65, 70–41, 156, 178; and architecture 92n170, 173–174; dematerialization 156, 172–173, 174; and engineering 37, 65; and feminism 6, 173, 216; on Grosvenor 37, 65, 71; and Primary Structures (exhibition) 80 Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (Oldenburg) 143, 153n166 lived illusion 74–75; see also illusion Live in Your Head (exhibition) 154, 159, 175, 177 living memorials 125–127, 150n107 Loeb Student Center 80, 92n175 LOMEX see Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX) Long, Richard 181 Loock, Ulrich 63 “Looking at American Sculpture” (Rose) 87n78, 168 Los Angeles Coalition for Women in the Arts 7 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 7, 72, 80–81 Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX) 82, 108, 109, 110, 118, 214 Lundy, Victor 48 Mackey, Wayne, Sr. 53 MacNair, Andrew 200, 202–203 Map of the Hotel Palenque (Smithson) 138, 138 Marcuse, Herbert 85n40, 147n59, 172, 207n53 Martin, Timothy 139, 152n153 Mason, Randall 127 “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, The” (Rowe) 90n140, 209n94 Matisse, Henri 48 Matta-Clark, Gordon 3, 4, 16–17, 154–157, 180; biographical background 156, 157, 180–182; and conceptual art 199; corner cuts 187–191, 188, 189; decontainerization 191–196; Englewood 182, 192–195, 196, 211n123; and film 181, 185–187, 192; Idea as Model (exhibition) 199–200; Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) 199–203, 202; and language 156, 185–187; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes 180; phenomenal transparency 195–199; and photography 196–198; and Rowe 180–181, 196–198, 199, 202; São Paulo Biennial 180; and SoHo 181–182, 187, 192; and

250

Index

Weiner 180, 181, 204; and urban renewal 181, 195, 202–203; Conical Intersect 195; drawings from a sketchbook 183, 184, 187, 190; Splitting 182–187, 182, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195; Splitting (film) 185–187; Splitting: Four Corners 187–188, 189; Splitting (book) 196, 197; Window Blow-Out 199, 200, 201, 202–203 Matta, Roberto 181 Maya 135, 139–143; and Coe 141; and Kubler 140–141; see also Palenque McAndrew, John 75 McCarter, Uzal Haggerty 126 McKim, Mead & White 94 McLendon Building 154, 158–159, 169, 171, 171 McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope 50, 59, 65–66, 65, 67, 68–69, 83n1, 89n109 McMath, Robert 66 McShine, Kynaston 80, 85n40, 90n129, 92n169, 92n170 Medium specificity 27, 38, 56, 79, 121 Meier, Richard 199–200, 202 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 74, 90n139 Meyer, Hannes 24–25, 33n15 Meyer, James 80, 83n4, 88n98, 90n132, 92n170 Michelson, Annette 4, 75, 199, 212n140 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 25, 59, 61, 86n52, 88n95, 162, 190 Miller, Angela 28, 35n34 Miller Lane, Barbara 25, 33n19 minimal art 3, 5, 10, 16, 37–38, 56, 63; and conceptual art 167, 170; and Fried 47, 88n99; and industrial fabrication 90n129, 172; and medium specificity 38, 56, 63, 75, 79, 80; and monuments 79; and Morris 76–77; and phenomenology 73–75; and pop art 37–38, 47; postminimalism 76, 77; Primary Structures (exhibition) 79–83; and public art 81; West Coast minimalism 72 Minimal Art (exhibition) 63 A Minimal Future? (exhibition) 73 Mirror Travels (Roberts) 121, 150n116 Miss, Mary 1, 3, 4, 17, 213; Battery Park City 8; and bear pit 1, 5, 11; biographical background 6; feminist art 6–8, 216; and fire towers 12–14; Heresies Collective 6–7; Krauss on 1, 9–10; Nassau County Museum of Art 1, 11; and perception 15; and pubic parks 15; and vernacular architecture 11, 12; Grate 8, 8; Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (Miss) 1, 2, 3, 6, 8–10, 11, 12–15, 13, 14, 215; Ropes/Shore 8; sketchbook pages 215–216, 215, 216; Stakes and Ropes 8; Untitled 9, 10 Missouri Botanical Garden Climatron 53

Model for a Large Ceiling Piece (Grosvenor) 81 “Modern Cult of Monuments, The” (Riegl) 97 modernism 6, 26, 37, 46–48, 60, 63, 73–74, 95, 215; architecture 25–26, 44–45, 60, 67–68, 94, 156, 162, 198, 199; and beaux­ arts 101; Greenberg’s theory 27, 29–30, 65; narrow modernism 6; postmodernism 10; urban planning 106, 128, 133 modernization 94–95, 109, 117, 131, 213; and LOMEX 108–110, 117; and Jacobs 110; and preservation 94–95; and destruction 109–110, 118, 121, 195 Mögelin, Else 23 Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam see Dez Dam (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam) Moholy-Nagy, László 24 monuments 5, 16, 94–95, 97; countermonument 114; definition 144n12; Ellis Island 99–102, 100; living memorials 124–127; Mothball Fleet 97–99, 97, 98; and Oldenburg 95–119; obstacle monuments 96, 102–108, 112, 119, 147n62; and photography 121, 126–127; and Primary Structures (exhibition) 80; and Smithson 119–144; and Twentieth Century Engineering (exhibition) 80; unintentional monuments 97; war memorials 106, 108, 114 Monuments of Passaic, The (Smithson) 95, 119, 120, 120, 121–128, 123, 129, 130, 131, 135, 139 Monument to Immigration (Oldenburg) 94–96, 99, 101, 102 Moore, Henry 81 More, Alan 187 Morning Span (Noland) 76 Morris, Catherine 156 Morris, Robert 9, 61, 91n155; Green Gallery 77; “Notes on Sculpture” 77; Primary Structures (exhibition) 80; Untitled (2 L’s) 70, 77 Moses, Robert 82, 106, 108–109, 117, 133 Mothball Fleet (National Defense Reserve Fleet) 96–99, 98 Mucha, Patty 115, 133 Mumford, Lewis 60, 88n94, 106, 124, 131 Muralist and the Modern Architect, The (exhibition) 29 Mural (Pollock) 29, 30 Murals 24, 28–31; see also photo murals Murals in Modern Architecture (exhibition) 28 Murphy, Joseph 53 Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes 180, 183 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 36 Muthesius, Hermann 33n14 Myers, Forrest 67

Index Nassau County Museum of Art 1, 11, 12

National Defense Reserve Fleet 97, 97, 98

National Historic Landmarks 132

“Nation of Immigrants, A” (Kennedy) 101,

145n26

Nauman, Bruce 8

Nazi Germany 200

Negative Map Showing Region of the

Monuments along the Passaic River

(Smithson) 129, 129

negro removal 172

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 40, 42, 46

Nelson’s Column 107

neo-data 29, 31

New Art History 4; see also social art history New City, The (exhibition) 199, 212n137 New Deal art projects 28

Newman, Barnett 58

New Monuments and the End of Man, The

(Slifkin) 18n9, 35n34, 125

“New Sculpture, The” (symposium) 90n129 Niaruna (Grosvenor) 64, 64, 69

Noguchi, Isamu 81

Noland, Kenneth 76, 91n147, 170

Nona, Richard 191, 210n112 Norvell, Patricia 174, 177

“Notes on Sculpture” (Morris) 76–77, 91n153 obelisk 113, 114–115, 148n70

obstacle monuments 96, 102–103, 106, 112

October (journal) 4, 199–200

O’Doherty, Brian 47

Oldenburg, Claes 3, 16, 31, 94–95;

biographical background 99; formal

analogies 104; and earthworks 95, 114,

117–119; Ellis Island proposals 95, 99,

102–104, 115; and happenings 31, 96,

99; and preservation 16, 94–95, 98,

101; immigrant 98–99; LOMEX 111,

117, 119; and minimal art 103, 106; and

modernization 16, 94–95, 107–110, 117;

and Mothball Fleet 98–99, 97, 98; and

Mucha 115–117; obstacle monuments 96,

102–107, 112, 119; and pop art 3, 95,

103–104; Popular Art (exhibition) 46;

Sculpture in Environment (exhibition) 81,

111, 119; sexual connotations 114–115;

unintentional monuments 98; and urban

renewal 110–111; and war memorials 106,

107, 114; Fotodeath 99; Injun 99; Lipstick

(Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks 143;

Monument to Immigration 94, 95, 96, 98,

99, 101, 104; Placid Civic Monument 81,

95, 111–117, 113, 118–119, 214; Proposed

Colossal Monument for Columbus Circle,

N.Y.C.—Silex Juicit 106; Proposed Colossal

Monuments for Ellis Island 102–104, 102,

251

103; Proposed Colossal Monument to

Replace the Nelson Column in Trafalgar

Square—Gearstick in Motion 107, 108;

Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace

the Washington Obelisk, Washington

D.C.—Scissors in Motion 115, 116;

Proposed Monument for the Intersection

of Canal Street and Broadway N.Y.C.

104, 105; Proposed Monument for the

Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway

N.Y.C.—Block of Concrete 111, 112; Soft

Switches 1/2 114; The Store 31, 96; The

Street 96

Oldenburg, Patty see Mucha, Patty ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN

ENAMEL (Weiner) 167

Onorato, Ronald 10, 17n3, 19n23, 19n27, 19n33 Oppenheim, Dennis 8, 180–181, 200; Beebe

Lake Cut 181

optical ambiguity 57

opticality 29–30, 38, 63, 65, 76

optical science 67

Owens, Craig 121

Owens, Gwendolyn 156

Painting for Spacious Living (exhibition) 29

Pakal, K’inich Janab 141

Palenque 134–135, 138, 143; and archeology

95, 134–138, 140–143; Maya ruins in

Palenque 134–135; palace at Palenque 135,

139–142, 140, 153n157; Hotel Palenque

95, 134–140, 140, 142, 143

Panza, Giuseppe 177–178, 208n83 Papapetros, Spyros 1, 17n2 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (LeWitt) 159

Park Place Gallery 37, 61, 62, 63–64, 64,

67–71, 75, 81

Passages in Modern Sculpture (Krauss) 75,

90n139

perceptual illusion 75; see also illusion PERHAPS WHEN REMOVED (Weiner) 180

Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (Miss) 1, 2, 3, 5,

8–10, 12, 12, 13, 13, 14, 14, 17n2, 19n33,

215

Peters, G.W. 100

phenomenal transparency 189, 196–199 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 8, 90n139 phenomenology 9, 67, 73–79; see also phenomenological transparency photography 9; and Grosvenor’s work 77–79; Matta-Clark 196–198; and preservation (historic preservation) 121, 126–127; Smithson 126–127, 128; see also photo murals photo murals 48, 52, 86n52

252

Index

Pico Canyon Oil Field (Well No. 4) 132

Pierce, Keith 66

Placid Civic Monument (Oldenburg) 81, 95,

111–119, 170, 214

Plastics (exhibition) 55–56, 87n79 plexiglass (plexiglas, Plexiglas) 15, 38–39, 38,

51, 53–54, 53, 56–58, 60, 81, 83n6, 87n70,

87n84

Plumwood, Val 217, 218n8 Pollock, Jackson 27–29, 29, 30, 31, 35n35,

35n36, 46, 96, 170

Poons, Larry 58

pop art 3, 5, 16, 29, 213; and Duchamp 122;

and Judd 37–38, 40, 47; and Mucha 115;

and Oldenburg 95, 103–104; Popular Art

(exhibition) 46–48; and Smithson 115; and

Weiner 158, 170, 172

Popular Art (exhibition) 46, 85n37 Port Authority Building 122, 124

poststructural formalism 4, 17n8, 214

Present Prospects of Social Art History, The (Grudin and Slifkin) 17n6

preservation (historic preservation) 16, 94–95,

98, 101; archeology 95, 134–137, 140–143;

and beaux-arts architecture 94, 99, 101,

141; and gentrification 134; Greenwich

Village 131; and Jacobs 131, 133;

Landmarks Preservation Commission (New

York) 94, 101, 131–132; and LOMEX 131;

and modernization 94–95, 131; National

Historic Landmarks 132; National Historic

Preservation Act 101; and Pennsylvania

Station 94, 101, 131; and photography 127;

SoHo 131–134; Watkins Mill 40–41, 142

Primary Structures (exhibition) 61, 70, 75–77,

79–81, 90n129, 92n169, 103, 159, 174

Propeller paintings (Weiner) 158

Proposed Colossal Monument for Columbus

Circle, N.Y.C.—Silex Juicit (Oldenburg) 106

Proposed Colossal Monument—Fan in Place

of the Statue of Liberty, Bedloes Island

(Oldenburg) 104

Proposed Colossal Monument for Ellis Island:

Frankfurter with Tomato and Toothpick

(Oldenburg) 102, 102

Proposed Colossal Monument for Ellis Island:

Shrimp (Oldenburg) 103

Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace

the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square—

Gearstick in Motion (Oldenburg) 108

Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace the

Washington Obelisk, Washington D.C.—

Scissors in Motion (Oldenburg) 115, 116

Proposed Monument for the Intersection of

Canal Street and Broadway N.Y.C.—Block

of Concrete (Oldenburg) 104, 105

public freehold 174–176, 207n67

Rainer, Yvonne 77 Raskin, David 18n9, 39, 84n11 Rauschenberg, Robert 31

Raven, Arlene 216

“Real War Memorials” (Goodman) 106,

146n44

“Recent Sculpture as Escape” (Lippard) 64

Red Studio, The (Mattise) 48

Reimagining Space (exhibition) 63, 89n102, 89n103, 89n121, 91n145 REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR

SUPPORT WALL, A (Weiner) 154, 155,

156–159, 169, 171, 174, 176, 177

representation 6, 11, 26, 68, 114, 121, 127,

129, 130, 173, 196, 203

representational art 4, 5, 25, 26, 29, 75,

115; and illusion 75; maps 129, 130;

photography 130, 196, 203

responsibility 10, 17, 38, 50, 155, 159, 166,

169, 175; responsible seeing 12, 14, 38

Responsive Eye, The (exhibition) 75, 90n143

Retracing the Expanded Field (Papapetros and Rose) 1, 17n2, 18n22 Reynolds, Ann 90n142, 128, 149n90, 151n117, 151n122 Richard, Frances 156, 204n4 Riegl, Alois 97, 144n14 Rietveld, Gerrit 23

Robert Fraser Gallery 107

Roberts, Jennifer 121, 127

Robert Smithson: Photo Works (exhibition)

135

Rohm and Haas 53

Röhm, Otto 53–54 Roosevelt, Eleanor 125, 150n109 Root, John Wellborn 41

Ropes/Shore (Miss) 7

Rose, Barbara 47, 55, 168

Rose, Julian 1, 17n2, 104, 146n33 Rosenberg, Harold 27

Rosenquist, James 46

Rothko, Mark 28, 30, 35n40, 170

Rowe, Colin 75, 90n140, 156, 180–181, 189,

198–199, 202

Rudolph, Paul 131

ruins 94–95, 98; ruins in Palenque 134–144;

ruins in reverse 127–131, 139

Saarinen, Aline 131

Sand-Box Monument, The (Smithson) 129,

130

Sandler, Irving 27, 47, 81, 85n42

São Paulo Biennial 58, 88n87, 180

Schapiro, Miriam 6, 117, 216

Schuhmacher, Thomas 199

Schwandbach Bridge 51

Schwartz, Frederic 24

Index Scott, Felicity 51, 86n59 Sculpture in Environment (exhibition) 81, 111–112, 119 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (Krauss) 8, 75, 199, 215 Seagram Building 30, 59–60, 61, 66, 162, 189 Seductive Subversion (exhibition) 115 “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (LeWitt) 206n34 Serial Project #1 (ABCD) (LeWitt) 163–165, 164 SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND, A (Weiner) 166, 167 sexual allusions 115, 128–129 Shahn, Ben 28 Shaked, Nizan 173 Shanken, Andrew 125 Shannon, Joshua 3–4, 31, 39, 48, 96 Sharp, Willoughby 181 Shiff, Richard 75 Sidney Janis Gallery 102–103, 115 Siegelaub, Seth 154, 157–159, 173, 176, 179 Silos et élévateurs à blé aux États-Unis 44 Singular Vision (exhibition) 73, 78 site-specific art (site specificity) 1, 154 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 41, 65, 110 “Skin of the Earth, The” (Hamill) 10 Slieve Roe (Stella) 76, 91n148 Slifkin, Robert 28, 114, 125; see also Present Prospects of Social Art History Slutzky, Robert 181, 189, 198 Smith, Katherine 96, 103 Smith, Laurajane 131 Smithson, Robert 3, 9, 16, 53, 67, 94–95, 180; and archeology 95, 134–135, 139, 140, 142–143; biographical background 122; and Bingham Canyon Open Pit Copper Mine 142–143; “Crystal Land” 122; and Duchamp 122–123; Earth Art (exhibition) 181; “Entropy and the New Monuments” 122; and film 131; and Greenwich Village 143; and Holt 122, 135, 143; and Judd 53, 122, 126, 149n98; “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” 141, 142; and land art (earth art) 3, 16, 95, 181; and living memorials 125–127; and maps 129; Maya ruins in Palenque 135, 139, 141–143; and minimal art 95, 119, 129; and modernization 16, 94–95, 121, 131, 143; monuments 95, 119, 125; “The Monuments of Passaic” 119–124, 123; in Palenque 134–135, 136–137, 143, 153n157; and Park Place Gallery 67, 89n115; and photography 126–127, 128; and pop art 95, 119; Port Authority Building 122, 123; and preservation 16, 94–95, 121, 127,

253

131–134; ruins in reverse 127–131, 139; SoHo preservation 131–134; The Bridge Monument Showing Wooden Sidewalks 119–120, 120; The Desert 129–130, 130; The Fountain Monument 122, 128; Hotel Palenque 95, 135–140, 136–138; The Monuments of Passaic 95, 120, 121–124, 123, 125–126, 127–131, 130, 135; Negative Map Showing Region of the Monuments along the Passaic River 129, 129; The SandBox Monument 129, 130 Smith, Tony 81 Smyth, Ned 183 social art history 4, 17n8, 214 sociopolitical avant-garde see avant-garde Soft Switches 1/2 (Oldenburg and Mucha) 114–115 SoHo 48, 94, 109, 117–118, 131–134, 178, 182, 187, 192, 214 Solomon, Holly 181, 192, 209n100, 212n147 SOM see Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) specific objects 39, 56 “Specific Objects” (Judd) 37, 39, 56 Speer, Albert 25 Splitting (Matta-Clark) 182–185, 187, 186, 188, 189, 192, 195–196, 197 stainless steel 48, 54, 55, 56–57 Stakes and Ropes (Miss) 7 STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (Weiner) 166, 208n74 Statements (Weiner) 154, 157, 158, 166–170 Statue of Liberty 101, 104 Stella, Frank 47, 54, 58, 76, 91n148, 91n149, 92n160 Stephens, John Lloyd 141–142 St. Mary’s Falls Canal 132 Stölzl, Gunta 22, 33n12 Store, The (Oldenburg) 31, 96 Street, The (Oldenburg) 96 suspension cables 54, 70; see also bridges Swain, Richard 61 Swenson, Kirsten 162 Switzer Brothers 54 Synthetic Proposition, The (Shaked) 173 Temple of the Mira (Higgins) 81 Tenerife (Grosvenor) 71–73, 76, 78 Theodor Heuss Bridge 48, 52, 52, 54 Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Banham) 67 Third Reich 25, 33n21 Three Elements (Bladen) 80 Three Faces (Léger) 198 Tillim, Sidney 47–48 Tobin, Amy 6, 18n13 Topanga (Grosvenor) 61, 62, 63–66, 68–71, 75–77

254

Index

Torre, Susanna 6 “total artwork” see Gesamtkunstwerk towers 5, 14, 48; BMA Tower 41, 88n90; cooling tower 51, fire tower 12–14; glasscurtain wall tower 59; and Le Corbusier 162; and McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope 66–67; and Mies 59, 162, 189; and Palace at Palenque 140–141, 140; and Perimeters/ Pavilions/Decoys 12–15, 13, 14, 19n31; and Twentieth Century Engineering 48, 51, 66, 82; and zoning resolution 161–162; see also Lever House; Seagram Building; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill TRACCE/ TRACES (Weiner) 169–170, 206n46 traffic yellow 68 Transoxiana (Grosvenor) 15, 37, 61, 62, 63–64, 69–71, 70, 75–76 “Transparency” (Rowe and Slutzky) 181, 196, 198 Tuchman, Maurice 7, 72, 81, 82 turnbuckle boxes 39, 53–57, 60, 87n79, 87n84 Turrell, James 67 Twentieth Century Engineering (exhibition) 15, 36–38, 48–54, 50, 49, 56–57, 59–61, 63, 65–66, 79, 82, 83n1, 126 TWO MINUTES OF SPRAY PAINT (Weiner) 168 Udall, Stewart 132 Union Avenue Bridge 122, 126 Union Carbide Building 162 Untitled (Grosvenor) 82, 83 Untitled, Black (Grosvenor) 63 untitled (DSS 39) (Judd) 40, 42 untitled (DSS 42) (Judd) 48 untitled (DSS 53) (Judd) 57 untitled (DSS 58) (Judd) 38, 38, 53–54, 55, 56–57, 87n79 untitled (DSS 83) 55 untitled (DSS 84) 74, 74 Untitled (Miss) 9 Untitled (2 L’s) (Morris) 70 Untitled (yellow) (Grosvenor) 63, 71, 72, 73, 76 urban renewal 82, 101, 110–111, 172, 195, 203, 214; and Jacobs 133; and LOMEX 107–111; negro removal 172; The New City (exhibition), 199, 212n137 Ursprung, Philip 122, 139, 156, 199 U.S.A. Flag (Oldenburg) 46 Using Walls (exhibition) 159 Valledor, Leo 62, 67 Van Arsdale, Harry, Jr. 110 van Bruggen, Coosje 144, 147n59

vernacular architecture 11, 12, 39, 45, 215; of the Midwest 41, 59; and SoHo 132 Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge 37, 37, 69, 82 Vers une architecture (Le Corbusier) 43–44 Vietnam War 5, 82, 97, 114, 144n11 Villa Stein (Le Corbusier) 198 Wagenfeld, Wilhelm 23 Wagner, Anne 10 Wagner, Richard 20 Wagner, Robert 100, 117 Ward, Richard 54 Warhol, Andy 47 war memorials 106–107, 125 Washington Obelisk (Washington Monument) 115, 116 Watkins Mill 40–41, 43, 43, 45–46, 48, 60, 132 Weimar Republic 24–25, 32n4 Weiner, Lawrence 3, 16–17, 154–157; and abstract expressionism 168, 170–172; in The Artists and Politics (Artforum) 178; biographical background 157, 158, 173, 179; and conceptual art 3–4, 156, 158, 166, 181; dematerialization 156, 170–174; democratization 156, 170, 172; and fascism 171–172; and institutional critique 156, 173; and language 156, 166, 177; and LeWitt 159, 166, 169, 180; materiality 154, 156, 177–178; and Matta-Clark 180, 181, 204; and Panza 178, 208n83; public freehold 174–176; São Paulo Biennial 180; and Siegelaub 154, 158, 159, 173, 180; specific statements 158, 177–178; in Xerox Book (Siegelaub) 180; and zoning resolutions (New York City) 154, 159, 166; AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH 170, 171; AN AMOUNT OF PAINT POURED DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR 167, 168; A FIRST QUARTER 178, 179; ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL 167, 178, 179; PERHAPS WHEN REMOVED/ QUIZÁS CUANDO REMOVIDO 180; Propeller paintings 158; REMOVED 169; A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL 154, 155, 157–158, 169, 171, 174, 176, 177; A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND 166, 167; STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF 166; Statements 154, 157, 158, 166–170; TRACCE/ TRACES 169–170, 177; TWO MINUTES OF SPRAY PAINT 168–169 Well No. 4 see Pico Canyon Oil Filed (Well No. 4)

Index “What Is Feminist Art” (exhibition) 216

Whiting, Cécile 3, 28, 96

Whitney, Charles S. 36

Whitney Museum 162

Wight and Wight 40

Wilding, Faith 216

William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art see Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Wilson, William 72, 76, 90n133, 91n151

Window Blow-Out (Matta-Clark) 199–200, 201, 202–203 Winter, John 189

Wittwer, Hans 24

Wolin, Ron 178

Women artists 6–8, 117, 173, 216–217; Ad

Hoc Women Artists’ Committee 6, 173; at

255

Bauhaus 22; Heresies collective 6; see also feminist art Woolworth Building 132

Working Drawings and Other Visible Things (exhibition) 168

Xerox Book (Siegelaub) 179, 208n87 Yard (Kaprow) 31

Young, James 114, 144n12, 148n69

Zabriskie, William 66

“Ziggurats” (LeWitt) 160–161, 162

zoning code see zoning resolutions (New York City) zoning resolutions (New York City) 154–155,

160–162, 164, 165, 205n18, 205n22