The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture between War and Peace, 1945–1975 9780691194264

Citation preview

THE NEW MONUMENTS AND THE END OF MAN

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THE NEW MONUMENTS AND THE END OF MAN U.S. SCULPTURE BETWEEN WAR AND PEACE, 1945–1975

R OB E RT SL I F KI N

PRINCE T ON U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S PRINCET O N A N D O X FO R D

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For Amos, wily prophet

Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu Jacket illustration by Mike Reddy, based on Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970. All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-19252-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930956

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Designed by Jeff Wincapaw This book has been composed in Century Expanded LT Std Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in China

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7 INTRODUCTION: MONUMENTALISM AND METHOD

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CHAPTER ONE: THE NEW SENSE OF FATE

31

CHAPTER TWO: SCULPTURE AND THE WEAPON

67

CHAPTER THREE: NEW MONUMENTS AND REVERSED RUINS

117

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CREDIBILITY GAP

163

CHAPTER FIVE: THE EMPTY ROOM

191

NOTES 216 INDEX 236 ARTWORK/PHOTO CREDITS

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is the product of many years of reading, writing, looking, thinking, and talking. And while the majority of the reading and writing was a solitary affair, I am extremely grateful for the conversations and company of numerous friends and colleagues whose intelligence and encouragement kept me inspired and whose criticism and erudition kept me on the right track. Jay Curley, Hal Foster, Mark Haxthausen, Frank Heath, Alex Kitnick, Denise Lassaw, Meredith Martin, Alex Nemerov, Alex Potts, Jennifer Roberts, Sara Jane Roszak, Lytle Shaw, Rebecca Smith, and Marin Sullivan were especially crucial interlocutors; each read portions of the manuscript and provided valuable feedback that has critically shaped the final project. I am equally grateful for my colleagues and students at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University who have steadily challenged and stimulated me and have provided a supportive and congenial environment to work and think. In particular Pat Rubin and Michele M ­ arincola suggested genial advice in our occasional “chapter” meetings, Anne ­Wheeler shared her expertise on Robert Smithson’s archives, and Tom Crow offered sage insights on a range of subjects, both low and high. I was fortunate to have the support of a number of institutions, many of which provided not only financial support but also collegiality and inspiring locations. My research was deeply enriched by my time at three institutions: The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds where Jon Wood shared his expert insights about modern sculpture; at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the equally extraordinary library and scenery took my research to places I did not expect; and at the NYU Research Institute in Athens, where the opportunity to study classical statuary and architecture pushed me to think about the broader traditions of monumentality. A fellowship from the Hauser and Wirth Institute provided the opportunity to spend significant time in the archives of the David Smith Estate in New York where Susan Cooke, Tracee Ng, Rebecca and Candida Smith, and Peter Stevens all generously shared their knowledge. Earlier versions of chapters four and five appeared respectively in the journal American Art and the Terra Foundation book Experience (2107), and I am grateful to the publishers and editors at these volumes for their support and critical feedback. Two people made the inevitably laborious nature of writing this book much less onerous: Michelle Komie who expertly navigated the manuscript to its final form and Sam Allen who deftly tracked down images and prized reasonable licensing agreements from the local authorities. Mike Reddy, whose witty and evocative illustrations appear at the beginning of each chapter, was an ideal collaborator. And finally, I want to thank my family, Amanda and Amos, who, as the song goes, were there for the lowest lows and most of the highs that rocked this deadline chaser. 7

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TRAJECTORY OF V2 ROCKET

JEFFERSON NATIONAL EXPANSION MEMORIAL (“GATEWAY ARCH”)

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F. 53

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INTRODUCTION MONUMENTALISM AND METHOD

Everything cannot be so easily grasped and conveyed as we are generally led to believe; most events are unconveyable and come to pass in a space that no word has ever penetrated; more unconveyable than all else are art-­works, whose mysterious existences, whose lives run alongside ours, which perishes, whereas theirs endure. —­r ainer

maria rilke ,

Letters to a Young Poet

The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that stands under the constant threat of catastrophe is one that treats works of art with the same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world today. —­t heodor

adorno ,

“Valéry Proust Museum”

This book describes how a significant strand of visual art produced in the United States in the years between 1945 and 1975 responded to the perils and promises of technology at a moment when, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower described it in his farewell address on January 17, 1961, it appeared that the growing power of a “military-­industrial complex” threatened to fundamentally corrupt the nation’s politics, if not the “very structure of our society.”1 In particular the book considers how a number of American artists during these three decades—­a period demarcated by the respective ends of World War II and the Vietnam War—­reengaged with the largely neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a means to imagine the future in the face of humanity’s newfound capacity for self-­destruction by its own, technologically abetted hand. The fraught relationship between man and machine has been a recurrent theme throughout the history of modernity. Yet it took on a new, fateful significance in the wake of the United States’ decision to drop two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Humanity—­and the United States in particular—­now seemed to have harnessed, as Eisenhower’s predecessor, Harry Truman, stated in a radio address hours after the attack on Hiroshima, “the basic power of the universe . . . the force from which the sun draws its powers.”2 9

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This new phase of technological development, while certainly exhibiting the archetypal dilemmas of the Faustian bargain and the modern Prometheus, was arguably singular in its apocalyptic potential. There was a sense that humanity’s relationship to the natural world had been irrevocably changed and that the future would never be the same, whether that meant that mankind would no longer be beholden to the limited resources of the planet or that humanity would destroy itself and its environment, or at least return either or both to an almost elemental, if not primordial, existence. The truly world-­historical implications heralded by the dawn of the nuclear era for both peaceful and militaristic ends were not only articulated by presidents but suffused nearly all realms of existence in postwar American society, bringing, as Tom Vanderbilt puts it in his vibrant account of Cold War “survival” culture, “the tremors of an unrealized war into the textures of everyday life.”3 While the threat of attack required concrete means of deterrence and dispersal, like the Interstate Highway System (begun in 1956) and the concomitant growth of suburbs, as well as innovative conceptual strategies like cybernetics that were dedicated to the command and control of complex systems, the sense of living under the constant and spatially expansive menace of nuclear extermination had manifold social resonances and psychological effects that informed various realms of culture in both direct and oblique ways.4 In the way that it posed more problems than it could possibly solve, the atomic bomb was something of a perverse philosophical object, making questions of fate, free will, and humanity’s relationship to its environment a matter of life and death. Along with numerous social scientists and philosophers, many artists and writers in the immediate postwar years sought to address the existential consequences foretold by the bomb. William Faulkner, in his 1950 Nobel lecture, declared that “our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?”5 Expanding on President Truman’s assessment of the fundamentally material—­ and notably molecular—­implications of the atomic era, Tennessee Williams declared in 1949 that in “an age of demented mechanics, all plastic art is created under the threat of material destruction,” going on to argue for the elemental bond between the source of this menace and the painter’s very materials, since “even at the base of the pigment are the explosive elements of the atom.”6 Williams’s assertion of the reconfiguration of artistic practice in the light of the atom bomb was echoed in the words of painters like Willem de Kooning, who stated, somewhat skeptically, in 1951 that “today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all” and Jackson Pollock, who around the same time described his paintings as part of a larger social reality that included “the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio.”7

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Such explicit references to “the bomb” by artists and writers in the years following the end of the war were quite common. A number of critics and scholars in the ensuing years have considered the ways in which postwar visual art reflected and responded to this momentous matter, whether in terms of expressive imagery, as in the Pollock’s cosmic vortexes or Adolph Gottlieb’s avowed “blasts” or in more allegorical portrayals of the ravages of war by artists such as Philip Evergood or Isamu Noguchi, or in the even more explicit antiwar imagery artists like Nancy Spero or Ed Kienholz began to employ in the 1960s as the country became increasingly mired in a seemingly unwinnable war in Vietnam (that was largely waged as a “limited” war meant to prevent “all out” nuclear war between the world superpowers).8 Yet these examples of the ways in which the subject of war was figured in the visual arts of the postwar period are in in many ways anomalous. The history of art in the United States beginning in 1945 has been generally understood as a succession and arguably a refinement of various types of abstraction, from the gestural brushstroke of abstract expressionism, to the geometric austerity of minimalism, to the informational abstraction of conceptualism, with pop providing the only significant instance of overt representation and perhaps not surprisingly contributing many of the most important examples of antiwar imagery such as James Rosenquist’s F-­111 (see fig. 71) or Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) on Cater­ pillar Tracks (see fig. 25). Despite the profound existential repercussions and equally decisive historical and political importance of the atomic bomb and the harnessing of nuclear energy, attention to the ways these matters influenced aspects of US postwar culture has been notably lopsided. While many commentators have effectively demonstrated how a “nuclear fear” motivated a wide array of popular forms, such as science-­fiction literature and cinema, and crucially informed social practices such as city planning and school programs that taught children to “duck and cover,” when it comes to examples of what are traditionally viewed as high art such as painting and sculpture, these issues typically take a back seat to questions of formal innovation and theoretical explication, perhaps because of a long-­standing deference to the ostensible nonobjective indeterminacy of these practices or because of an embarrassment at the kitschy and humanistic themes such topics inevitably summon.9 When postwar art in the United States is considered through a historical perspective (which arguably has become an increasingly prevalent social-­ methodological approach to this material), it is commonly interpreted as a product of what one author has called “the cultural Cold War,” in which artists and their works are understood as complicit or unconscious dupes of governmental policies that sought to present modernism’s will toward abstraction and abstruseness as evidence of first-­world democratic freedom and a foil to communist totalitarianism.10 It should be added that these sorts of readings have less to say about the art of the 1960s and 1970s, a moment Monumentalism and Method

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when more “cool” approaches like minimalism, pop, and conceptualism became dominant, and yet if anything the presence of war became increasingly felt among many citizens. This book offers a different sort of social-­historical reading of postwar art in the United States. Its focus is less on how the subject of war was articulated, visualized, and critiqued, or the covert ways in which it may have been marshaled for specific political aims, and more on the way that humanity’s possible self-­destruction radically reconfigured the underlying assumptions about what it means to make a work of art in the first place. If the category of art can be understood as designating a special type of object, one, as Rilke states, “whose lives run alongside ours, which perishes, whereas theirs endure,” as well as one whose bestowed cultural significance warrants its preservation across time and space, typically through the institution of the museum, then what does it mean to create art when the future of society and the Earth seems critically endangered? What is the modern artist’s role when, as Henry Miller wrote in his 1956 study of the poet Rimbaud, the visionary, prophetic capacities associated with vanguard or avant-­ gardist practices seems “menaced” by the precariousness of the future and the works of contemporary artists appear to “lie like fallen tombstones amidst the still i­ntact, still upright splendors of ancient times.”11 Miller’s image of a fallen tombstone as a symbol for the fate of the artist, and more generally the fate of the “American species,” which he declares “is in danger of being extinguished altogether,” hints at one reason why the category of the monument became a significant motif for a number of artists working in the postwar years. His words also suggest how the equally pressing question concerning the status of man as an active agent in the world, typically understood in terms of the rubric of humanism, may have been instigated by humanity’s newfound technological reach.12 That perhaps the “end of man” as posited by (mostly French) thinkers like Jean-­Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault may have only been thinkable and articulable after the end of man was technologically possible and that the antihumanist sentiments expressed in the work and writings of an American artist like Robert Smithson (who would draw on Foucault’s notably geological metaphors in his statement that “the object or thing or word ‘man’ could be swept away like an isolated sea shell on a beach”) may have been crucially informed by the military-­ technological nexus of postwar American culture that made a posthumanist landscape a literal possibility.13 Some of the central concepts associated with postmodernism, such as the professed “end of grand historical narratives” and the concomitant critique of a humanist perspective that sought to “de-­ center” man from an anthropocentric, universal, and transcendental model of subjectivity, may find aspects of their origins in the new existential terrain augured by the bomb, even as the threat of the extinction of humanity generated an effulgence of humanism.14 The nuclear-­apocalyptic foundations for the humanist response to the postmodern de-­centering of the subject is pithily 12

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summarized in a line from Ed Dorn’s 1960 poem “Sousa,” which declares: “The desire to disintegrate the earth / is eccentric.” With these sorts of questions in mind, I have set out to offer not simply a more nuanced or historically specific account of a major strand of the art of the postwar period but also what I take to be a more generous approach to understanding the significance of these works, one that sees artists as more than illustrators or cultural barometers, who merely reflect on larger social ideals and anxieties, or as unwitting dupes or opportunistic dissemblers who were complicit to the hegemonic politics and propaganda of the Cold War, or even as critical activists, protesting the evils of the military-­industrial complex through their work. In many ways, my focus is less attuned to questions of authorial intention or critical agency than on the ways that works of art can signify and resonate beyond their creator’s primary artistic aims and objectives. Throughout this book I apprehend works of art as complex and often contradictory nodes within a multifaceted array of cultural practices that can offer a privileged perspective for under­ standing what might be called the epistemological and even ontological implications of nuclear war, and more generally, the technological capacity of humanity to destroy itself (or just as crucially choose not to). The works that will be discussed in the following pages address to various extents the specific questions and challenges that confront a society suddenly and irrevocably made precarious by the advent of technologies that appeared to have the potential to radically alter the fate of humanity. These works also, I will contend, consider the social responsibilities of such a society, even if—­or for that matter especially because—­it emerged victorious from a war, whose both military and social implications seem to be boundless both in time and space.15 Which is not to say that I don’t at times recognize the ways these works did in fact reflect and respond to the culture in which they were created, and even at times seek to assuage the political and psychological anxieties that the atomic age instigated. Indeed, one of the central theses of this book is how these works in their oftentimes dramatic vision of a decimated, dehumanized future contained a strident message of the necessity of a new social order that would render such conflicts obsolete, demonstrating how, as Hans Magnus Enzens­ berger has argued, “The idea of the end of the world is simply a negative utopia.”16 By considering postwar art through the relationship of technology and war (and as a corollary, technology and peace), a very different sort of history of the period emerges. Most notably perhaps, the conventional chronology based on a progression of stylistic movements loses its apparent self-­evidence and usefulness. During my research, as I tracked the numerous instances when the question of war was directly cited by certain artists and critics during the period between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War and began to consider the ways that this body of work registered and responded to humanity’s vexed relationship to technology, particularly through what Monumentalism and Method

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could be called varieties of futurological imagination, it became increasingly apparent to me that many of these works share certain affinities that could be considered if not a coherent style, certainly a significant concern, and one that manifested itself in certain formal and conceptual affinities that drew on this heightened sensitivity to questions regarding temporality. An admittedly loaded but nonetheless revealing comparison will highlight some of the correspondences my study will pursue. Separated by nearly thirty years, Peter Grippe’s City #3 from 1947 (see fig. 8) and Michael Heizer’s City begun in 1972 (see fig. 66) might seem at first glance to be in many ways diametrically antithetical in terms of their respective place in the history of modern art, the former appearing as a traditional sculpture made from the age-­old method and materials of molding terra-­cotta and the latter with its expansive and decidedly architectural semblance confounding the very category of sculpture itself, both works can be understood as responding to the central anxieties concerning the survival of human culture and its monuments in the second half of the twentieth century. In the case of Grippe’s City, the thin, curved terra-­cotta armature of his city is inscribed with dates from the historical past and from the future symbolizing the material precariousness of human culture and the urge to preserve it. Heizer’s City, in its massiveness and stolidity, registers these concerns negatively, serving as a buttress against destruction and ruination, while its associations with Mesoamerican sources (which are equally visible in the faces that adorn the surface of Grippe’s work) summon a Pan-­American precedent for a lost civilization, and its location in the empty, desiccated landscapes of the American West not far from the testing grounds of the US Air Force, suggesting the very threat the work sought to contest. Indeed, the expansive scale of Heizer’s work invites an aerial perspective, which in the postwar period had distinct connotations of bombardment. The mazelike negative spaces produced by the supporting walls within Grippe’s sculpture, which can be seen to summon the images of decimated European cities that began to appear in the first years of the war, similarly invite an overhead view (see fig. 9). These intimations of an aerial perspective and its associations to military violence begin to insinuate how the activation of space, which became something of a leitmotif in the critical reception of postwar sculpture, resonated with much larger cultural anxieties of the period and, more important to the larger claims of my book, indicate the ways that the largely aesthetic and ontological considerations that have dominated the discussion of postwar sculpture in the United States were crucially informed by social and political matters. Which is, of course, not to suggest an uninterrupted and unswerving trajectory ­between the art of the immediate postwar years and that of the 1960s and 1970s or that the varied array of art produced between the thirty-­year period between 1945 and 1975 came out of similar social conditions. The difference between a work like Grippe’s and 14

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that of Heizer reflects not only the two artists’ different approaches to sculpture but also the changing attitudes about the peril of nuclear annihilation that took place between the immediate postwar years and those of the 1960s and beyond. As Paul Boyer argues in his pathbreaking history of US nuclear culture, a fundamental shift in attitudes concerning the threat of nuclear war took place following the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. After this genuine, albeit ultimately thwarted, confrontation between the n ­ uclear superpowers, military policies on both sides of the political divide began to pursue a policy of détente, which sought to transfer the risk of all-­out global nuclear war to that of “limited wars,” which would take place in so-­called third-­world countries like Vietnam. According to Boyer, as fear diminished about of an attack on the home front, “the prevailing American stance toward the nuclear war threat from 1963 to well into the 1970s was one of apathy and neglect.”17 And yet while angst-­ridden visions of nuclear apocalypse largely faded from public view by the mid-­1960s the underlying anxieties about human-­ induced technological destruction that motivated so much of postwar culture did not so much disappear but, as I will argue, were distilled into less dramatic and arguably more decorous forms like the austere and often industrially fabricated objects of minimalism and the spatially expansive practices of land art like Heizer’s, which nonetheless often carried an expressive charge that was recognized by many of its initial viewers. While artists and critics typically did not mention the subject of nuclear war in any direct way (although, as I will show in chapter three, artists like Heizer did in fact overtly declare these concerns, and allusions to the subject can be discerned more often than most previous accounts of the period suggest) these factors continued to inform central aesthetic concerns such as permanence, spatial expansiveness, and most central to the book, the concept of the monument. The endpoint of my study, 1975, delimits not only the official termination of the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam but also the moment when certain spatial practices associated with sculpture and installation became in many ways the dominant aesthetic paradigm for advanced artistic practices (so that even painting exhibitions were to be perceived in terms of installation and numerous contemporary art spaces contain galleries whose vast, often industrial scale often competes for the attention of the beholder with the art on display). This was the moment when, to use the influential language of Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 essay, “the white cube” of the gallery would become recognized as an aesthetic element in its own right.18 In fact, as I argue in the final chapter, this ultimate aestheticization of the gallery space and academicization of the expressive potential of sculptural space (typically understood through the respective philosophical and academic discourses of phenomenology and institutional critique) obscured the more overt political significance—­and arguably the expressive capacity—­ of this body of work, its ardent engagement with exigencies of what Buckminster Fuller Monumentalism and Method

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called “utopia or oblivion.”19 If the apocalyptic oblivion that Fuller hoped would be staved off by utopian practices like his own has not yet come to pass, the modern oblivion of the strident futurological visions of these works nonetheless might explain in part what appears to be contemporary society’s unwillingness to face the continued threat of technologically abetted destruction not only—­still—­in bombs and other forms of weaponry but also in the so-­called slow apocalypse portended by the effects of global warming in which the biblical covenant of “the fire next time” has been reversed into “the water again.”20 Thus the book’s focus on sculpture and the various “expanded” practices that would largely come to define the advanced art of the late 1960s and 1970s is not marshaled in the name of medium specificity or any sort of commitment to sculpture as a discrete and coherent field of practices. Rather, it seeks to understand how certain attributes associated with sculpture during this period, in particular its engagement with industrial and technological modes of production and its activation of actual space coupled with its long-­standing associations with monumentality, positioned a certain body of work as signal expressions of the new existential terrain of the nuclear era. This thesis was already intimated by Jack Burnham, who in the final pages of his Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), a book that considers the intertwined histories of modern sculpture and technology and thus in certain ways offers an important precedent to my own study, muses on how because “future human life now depends upon the control, if not rehabilitation of industrial technology—­both as a maker of consumer goods and weapons” and because of the possibility of “an irreversible technology, one that destroys organic life and substitutes for it very sophisticated forms of synthetic life,” “modern sculpture” has a role in “shaping our destination as a post-­human species.”21 If sculpture and other three-­ dimensional practices increasingly became the dominant mode of artistic production in the years between 1945 and 1975, this was due not to the aesthetic dictates of modernist materialism or postmodernist critique but rather because of the way these works spoke to some of the most pressing social issues of the time. Indeed, in its frequent allusions to technology and with its long-­standing associations to the memorial statue, U.S. sculpture in the years between 1945 and 1975 often conveyed a broad temporal span from a prehistorical past to the future, and, more generally, between the anticipated dangers of war and the promises of peace. In this regard, pace Faulkner, the true tragedy of the postwar era is not the awareness of our possible extinction through technological war so much as our continued refusal to seek a different political path that would make the world a more peaceful place.

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MONUMENTS AND MONUMENTALISM At a moment when the future of humanity seemed tethered to the powers of technology (and in particular militarized technology), numerous artists began creating works that in one way or another turned to the tradition of the sculptural monument. In general these works were not monumental because of their size, scale, or siting (although many of the works were relatively large and did activate their surroundings). Or perhaps one might say they were not monumental merely because of these conventional attributes. Rather, I hope to show in the following pages how a great deal of three-­dimensional art from this period, from the categorically modernist sculptures of David Smith to the avowedly specific objects of Donald Judd to environmental and installation-­based practices of an artist like Robert Smithson, all exhibited a crucial degree of what might be called monumentalism. Whether designated by their creators or critics as a monument or not, these works often exhibited a complex temporal dimension that imagined a vision of the future, whether utopian or catastrophic, that through various effects that emphasized the material presence of the sculptural object, was synchronized to the contemporary space and time of the viewer. In their multitemporal mode of address these works offered some of the most articulate expressions of a society standing on the crux of an age of unprecedented possibility and predestined peril. Considering the alternatingly primordial and futuristic fantasies of death and destruction prompted by the fear of nuclear war it is understandable that the monument, with its deep-­seated associations as monolithic marker of time—­one can think of the calendrical arrangements of Stonehenge as much as the memorial, and oftentimes ­funerary, functions of classical statuary—­experienced something of a renaissance in the postwar years. The Janus-­faced temporal logic of the monument, in which its physical presence simultaneously recalls an event or figure from the past and points to its anticipated perpetuation into an unspecified future, provided an unparalleled means for numerous artists to engage with the preposterously anachronic apocalypse predicted by the postatomic condition, one that was stridently expressed in US Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s threat in 1965 that the power of these space-­age weapons had the capacity to revert their targets—­the North Vietnamese in this instance—­“back to the Stone Age.”22 This new monumentalism beginning in the years after the war was in many ways unexpected. As Lewis Mumford suggested in an essay from 1937, a modern monument is a contradiction in terms since even the most ostensibly contemporary monument risks possible obsolescence, irrelevance, and unintelligibility as it perseveres in an environment that is bound to change both materially and ideologically.23 Already by 1903 the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl, in a now canonical essay on the theoretical Monumentalism and Method

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implications surrounding the preservation of monuments, claimed that the traditional monument, understood as “a work of man erected for the specific purpose of keeping particular human deeds or destinies (or a complex accumulation thereof) alive and present in the consciousness of future generations,” has “all but come to a halt today.”24 For many artists and critics it seemed that modern society, committed to progress and the reevaluation of inherited values, by and large regarded the conventional monument, with its associations of heroic grandeur and timeless universality, as incapable of representing—­ and memorializing—­the experience of life in the twentieth century, rendering the form, in the words of the architectural historian Anthony Vidler, “inimical to modernity.”25 This especially appeared to be the case in the years following the end of World War II, when there was a strong desire among many Americans to forget rather than commemorate the trauma of the recent past. As the architectural historian Andrew Shanken has argued, “Building a victory column or a triumphal arch was anathema to a moment when many Americans experienced a compelling drive to move on and to forget war and the society that had fought two of them in quick succession.”26 And yet, as Shanken’s study of the rise of so-­called living monuments such as memorial highways and community centers in the postwar years reveals, there was still a desire to commemorate the war, albeit in new and emphatically nontraditional ways. In fact, it could be argued that it was the perceived inadequacy of traditional monumental forms in the face of the apparently unprecedented challenges of postwar society that seemed to motivate a spirited debate about the subject, and the creation of new modes of monumentalism, first in the realm of architecture and later in art and sculpture in particular. In a symposium dedicated to city planning in 1944, Sigfried Giedion and Louis Kahn addressed “The Need for a New Monumentality,” arguing for a specifically modern architectural lexicon that could replace a classical tradition that seemed discredited because of its associations with fascism, and, more importantly, use the new materials and techniques specific to the twentieth century.27 Like many other architects of the postwar era, Giedion and Kahn understood the concept of monumentality less in terms of memorialization and more in the way a building presented itself in mass and space as well as its visible affinity with past styles. For instance, in 1962 the architect and writer ­Thomas Creighton announced what he saw as a “new monumentalism” evident in the work Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, and Kahn, whose use of masonry and concrete brought a distinctly modern sense of massiveness to their buildings and presented an alternative to the use of new, unconventional materials like plastic, aluminum, glass, and steel, which seemed “characteristically inappropriate for perpetuating an ideal or immortalizing a personality.”28 If Creighton’s statement reveals the lingering desire to associate monumentality with material permanence in the modern—­and postmodern—­ era, it also suggests the ways that materials could signify in their own right, investing 18

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buildings with a communicative or even referential component that was decidedly nonsymbolic or iconographic. In an essay from 1949, Mumford noted this facet of postwar monumentalism, claiming that Giedion’s thesis for “a new monumentality” was primarily a means of investing a building with meaning, so that “it is not enough for a modern building to be something and do something: it must also say something.”29 These architectural precedents for the sort of sculptural monumentalism that will be the focus of this book bring to the fore the question of modern art’s referential quotient and how unambiguously abstract and nonobjective entities such as buildings can generate meaning. Even the most ostensibly abstract monuments—­from ancient obelisks to Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch (see fig. 53)—­can be seen to be fundamentality referential, signifying through their massive physical presence that dramatically ascends skyward, suggesting some sort of transcendence of the earthly realm and mundane temporality, their use of materials that connote permanence, or in the case of the Gateway Arch’s stainless steel, industrial strength, as well as through more conventional modes of monumental reference, such as textual inscriptions that relate their material presence with specific historical events or figures. As such they provide a valuable model to approach the question of modern monumentalism in postwar sculpture, whose status as purely nonobjective or abstract seems in many ways far more ambiguous. As numerous scholars have noted, sculpture in its physical actuality always retains a degree of material thingness that makes its wholesale nonobjectivity impossible. Yet for many critics the apparent “objecthood” of sculpture was a condition to be transcended through various means of negation and self-­reflexivity. Consequently, the history of postwar art and postwar sculpture in particular has frequently been presented, on the one hand, as an inquiry into the specific characteristics of the medium, and on the other, in terms of an increasing drive toward abstraction and, as one recent scholar put it, “semiological refusal,” thus making its engagement with the larger social realm inconsequential if ­evident at all.30 For instance, in one of the most influential accounts of postwar three-­dimensional practice, Rosalind Krauss charted the transition from a sculptural tradition that aspired to a degree of aesthetic autonomy through its nomadic “sitelessness” to one, beginning in the mid-­1960s, that would become increasingly attentive to the contingencies of its environment. If, according to Krauss, modern art (and again modern sculpture in particular), in its increasing bid for aesthetic autonomy, typically occupied what she called “the negative condition of the monument,” then this new, categorically postmodern art, in many ways epitomized by the earthworks of artists like Smithson, which made the question of site crucial, can be seen to indicate a renewed engagement with the monument, evident most clearly in the work of artists Claes Oldenburg, Dan Flavin, and Smithson, who often invoked the form in their art and writings.31 And while Krauss does not pursue Monumentalism and Method

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this line of inquiry in her essay, choosing instead to examine how these new “expanded” three-­dimensional practices of sculpture demand new criteria to establish their identity as art rather than sculpture per se (and thus, paradoxically, sustain a certain modernist commitment to aesthetic autonomy albeit now under the sign of site specificity rather than medium specificity), other scholars have recognized the “monument’s surprising revival in late modern, or so-­called postmodern, societies.”32 Indeed, a copious strand of scholarship has emerged in the last few decades that has begun to consider the various political and aesthetic ramifications of the conventional monument and its postmodern iteration, the anti-­or countermonument, analyzing their fundamental role in the construction and contestation of collective memory, national identity, and individual and social trauma.33 Yet very few of these examples of “monument studies” address in any complexity how the logic of the monument—­what could be described as a certain sort of monumentalism—­informed a significant strand of postwar sculpture. No doubt this is due to the fact that even the most overt instances of postwar sculptural monumentalism, such as Oldenburg’s and Flavin’s nominal examples, were clearly ironic or outright parodies of traditional examples of the form, acknowledging the outdatedness of such lofty ideals of timeless and universal significance. These “new monuments,” to borrow Smithson’s terminology, certainly did not demonstrate a discernable commitment to memorialization or even reference. Instead, they expressed a sense of contingency and impermanence of all things, serving as sites for debate and contestation rather than the unchallenged declaration of universal values. As I will argue, this paradoxical dynamic of signifying absence as a means to address nonexistence resides at the heart of postwar sculpture’s monumentalist revival. While Smithson’s conception of the inevitable entropic oblivion that awaits all forms of monumentality—­and human endeavor more generally—­might appear nihilistic or unexpectedly romantic (however valid or even visionary it may seem in the face of the existential implications of climate change), it also presents a paradigm for a monumentalism that is able to register the contingencies of experience and the discontinuities and multiplicities of history and, perhaps most importantly, repudiate the promise of permanence and possessiveness that has made the monument so ideologically problematic for a radical, let alone progressive, politics. Amid the current debates concerning which existing monuments should remain standing and which should be sent off to oblivion (or at least rendered less ideologically potent through their archivization in museums), it could be argued that works like Smithson’s posit an alternate vision of the form, one in which acts of remembrance exist alongside opportunities for contestation. Recent intimations of this sort of temporary and entropic monumentality can be discerned in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014) in which 20

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Fig. 1. Matthew N. Shain, Post-Monuments, Annapolis (Chief Justice Roger Taney, erected 1872), 2017. Archival inkjet print, 30 3 ∕8 × 25 3 ∕8 in. (77.2 × 64.5 cm), framed.

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the dynamics of commemoration and ruination operate in tandem, so that multiple publics are assembled and various meanings are generated without recourse to a rhetoric of universalism or timelessness. By proposing the necessity of an expiration date for all examples of the category, these works put forward an ethics to the monument’s characteristic temporal expansiveness, one whose ultimate message is not so much remember this as keep going.34 This message is vividly portrayed in Matthew N. Shain’s recent series of photographs depicting the empty plinths that previously supported s­ tatues depicting confederate soldiers and statesmen that have been removed in response to the growing awareness of the statues’ prevailing message of white supremacy (fig. 1). These boxlike and notably minimalist-­looking pedestals devoid of their statuary take on the semblance of just this sort of monument to the contingency of history, suggesting, however ironically, the prophetic—­and antiauthoritarian if not politically progressive—­ vision of the “new monuments” of the 1960s.

PROSPECTIVE WAR AND REVERSED TRAUMA Because the Cold War was in principle a war that never took place, it was marked by a peculiarly anticipatory attitude (and, one might add, a decidedly preemptive politics). Most wars leave their mark in the traces of physical damage on buildings, borders, and bodies, yet in the years after 1945 the visualization of military violence became principally a matter of prediction and remained for most Americans—­until the televised broadcast of the war in Vietnam beginning in the second half of the 1960s—­largely in the realm of an imagined future. And even the mediated horrors of Vietnam seemed distant and not personally threatening to viewers on the home front. For postwar American culture the paradigmatic trauma of the next war—­the proverbial “World War Three,” which in many ways the wars in Korea and Vietnam were waged to stave off—­lay waiting in some indeterminate but seemingly inevitable future. Indeed, it could be argued that the Cold War, especially as it was experienced in the United States, reverses the conventional dynamics of trauma—­itself a product of war, conceived of by Sigmund Freud in the early years of the twentieth century in response to his treatment of shell-­shocked veterans—­ in which a disturbing event precedes its symptomatic manifestations in a subject. As Cathy Caruth notes in her insightful study of the concept, there is an inherent belatedness to trauma. Because the original traumatic event cannot be psychically processed immediately, it typically manifests itself as an “often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomenon.”35 These imaginary and notably repetitive coping mechanisms function to guard the subject from confronting the actual source of trauma, which remains suppressed in the unconscious.

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In the case of postwar American culture, which unlike Europe or Asia did not experience firsthand bombardment, the traumatic event would lie ahead in the future. Yet that did not mean that the psychic mechanisms of repression and repetition did not ­operate in the culture at large. Indeed, the futurological imagination of disaster would motivate some of the most important cultural expressions of the postwar period in the United States. While this vision of an imperiled Earth would be most extensively surveyed in the science-­fiction literature and cinema of the period, it also crucially informed the work of many artists and thinkers who considered the paradoxical way in which humanity’s technological advancement might alternately lead to its total annihilation or, conversely, a new level of social justice and peace through the equitable distribution of resources. Such visions of a technologically advanced utopia might be seen as a means of managing and assuaging the traumatic threat of war. In fact, for certain thinkers, the very menace of nuclear war served as the principle impetus for a new, more equitable vision of society. This dynamic of promise and peril is, according to Anthony Vidler, “the repressed master discourse of the twentieth century: not the trauma of past lost but the anticipatory fear of future loss; in an age of futurism, the buried response of fear to optimism and hope.”36 This book seeks to understand the ways in which this ultimatum of war or peace (or utopia or oblivion) crucially informed a major strand of postwar artistic production as well as to consider the dynamics that kept these political issues largely unarticulated within the artistic discourse. As a country that was responsible for the first use of nuclear weapons and yet never experienced on its own soil the ravages of modern, “total” war, which largely eliminated the distinction between military and civilian targets, the United States exhibited a particularly prospective perspective toward the threat of what Peter Sloterdijk has called “terror from the air.”37 Americans in the years after World War II wavered between naive ignorance and anxious anticipation, hopeful of some form of salvation but resigned to the predestination of technological destruction. Thomas Pynchon, in his at turns dark and comic novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), described this condition in terms of the “Preterite,” those who have been passed over, whether by grace or, more likely, by a missile “screaming across the sky.”38 (One can think of Tyrone Slothrop, the book’s protagonist, as the paradigmatic figure for the postwar American, whose peripatetic trajectory across the globe in search of sex and pleasure is nothing less than a means of predicting future military targets.) Pynchon’s complex parable of technology’s—­and military technology in particular—­invasive reach into every realm of modern society, directing international policies and interpersonal relations alike, and requiring an a­ lmost paranoiac attentiveness to the manifold forces that may only be comprehensible retrospectively, suggests the sorts of hermeneutic and narratological strategies necessary to address the

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unprecedented futurological trauma instigated by the advent of such a­ pocalyptic weapons (whose parabolic trajectory provides the title for his novel). As numerous historians have argued, the apparently clean-­cut optimism associated with the immediate postwar era as much as the live-­in-­the-­now, “tune in, turn on, drop out” ethos of the next generation’s counterculture both can be interpreted as symptomatic responses to the trauma of a world on the brink of destruction in which the ideal of a better society is predicated on a certain degree of oblivion. Moreover, one could argue that it was because of the traumatic intensity of humanity’s possible extermination that the most deeply felt aspect of this period was not often manifestly expressed in the more decorous realms of what is considered high culture. The harrowing consequences of a possible future war, one that was expected to be unprecedentedly devastating due to the exceptional power of nuclear weapons, made the survival of human civilization—­and as a corollary its possible salvation—­a central theme in postwar culture, albeit one that was often transposed through allegory and metaphor or displaced into what appeared to be formal and purely conceptual strategies. As Boyer notes in the preface to his history of the atomic age, written in 1985, “if a scholar a thousand years from now had no evidence about what happened in the United States between 1945 and 1985 except the books produced by the cultural and intellectual historians of the era, he or she would hardly guess that such a thing as nuclear weapons had existed.”39 While Boyer’s statement seems slightly overstated considering the wealth of material in certain cultural realms like science fiction and public policy, it certainly resonates with the visual artistic production of the period. Rarely will the art in the following pages address the subject of war or even the fate of humanity in a clear and direct manner. It is precisely the dynamics of displacement and repression as a reaction to the traumatic subject of humanity’s possible extinction that motivates the art under analysis in this book and its critical reception. The book consists of five chapters that examine the various ways that the culture of war informed postwar U.S. sculptural practice. The chapters are laid out in roughly chronological order, beginning with a consideration of how the impact of the bomb affected artists in the second half of the 1940s through the early 1960s and ending with considerations of the continuing implications of humanity’s destructive powers into the 1970s. While individual artists occupy central roles in certain chapters, in particular Robert Smithson in chapter three and Donald Judd in chapter four, in general this book eschews monographic focus to ascertain larger tendencies across various practices and, more importantly, across what are understood to be discrete and largely antithetical stylistic periods. In this regard I hope to show that many of the concerns of the now largely marginalized sculpture of the 1950s—­its imagination of a future that would paradoxically resemble a primordial past, for instance—­prefigure facets of the work of 24

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a more recognized artist like Smithson, and that the sort of phenomenological mode of address associated with minimalism was explored in the work of artists of the previous generation like Herbert Ferber, Peter Grippe, and Ibram Lassaw. Ultimately, by bringing these bodies of work into conversation with one another I hope to reconsider both the achievements of certain artists who have been largely forgotten and the significance of minimalism and land art, bodies of work that continue to be central to the history of contemporary art and, in turn, develop new terms and criteria to understand these works. The notable predominance of white, male artists in my admittedly incomplete history of postwar sculpture warrants some explanation. No doubt some of this has to do with the still hegemonic patriarchal culture that dominated—­and to an arguably lesser but still crucial degree continues to dominate—­the art world and the world at large, a tendency that Linda Nochlin’s trenchant analysis from 1971 of the lack of “great w ­ omen 40 artists” still delineates with much insight and authority. Yet what is surprising in regard to the thesis of this study is just how many female artists during this period—­ artists such as Lee Bontecou (whose work is discussed at some length in the following pages), Martha Rosler, and Nancy Spero—­did address the subject of war more directly than their male counterparts. As my analysis focuses on the repressed dynamic of the traumatic content of war and the “end of man,” these more unequivocal, antiwar expressions (including examples by male artists like Leon Golub, Edward Kienholz, and Peter Saul) do not appear in the following pages. (Moreover, as my study focuses on three-­ dimensional practices, many artists, both male and female, whose pictorial imagery may have obliquely figured the theme of war and the end of man are also not considered.) One might argue that it was because many of the male artists not only had firsthand experience as soldiers and contractors during the period but also that the masculine associations of war made the sense of guilt and responsibility more pronounced in these artists’ psyches and in turn motivated the repressed engagement with subject (which women artists were arguably more free to address directly). If this reading comes a ­little too close to the sort of “modern man” discourse that Michael Leja has persuasively shown to have pervaded postwar American culture in which it was the agonistic trauma experienced by males, and which was not granted to other subjects such as women or persons of color, that invested their expressions with such dramatic intensity and left other demographics critically voiceless, it nonetheless reflects the largely masculinist tradition of warfare and its representation.41 As Fredric Jameson has argued, the representation of war has existed for most of its history in “a pre-­feminist world,” and “the absence of women is a significant structural part of the form.”42 Indeed, it is not hard to discern signs of this unapologetically masculine—­and at times hysterically macho—­ world in much of the art discussed in the following pages. The “end of man” was typically understood to encompass all of humanity, male and female alike, but its conventional Monumentalism and Method

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masculine nomination expresses perhaps the fundamental culpability of the patriar­ chal system that provoked the politics of possessiveness and the unavoidable recourse to military conflict as a means to negotiate its inherent contradictions. To rephrase Jameson, one might say that for many male artists and thinkers of the period, it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of patriarchal society. Likewise, while the work of certain artists of color such as Melvin Edwards, Rich­ ard Hunt, and Isamu Noguchi appear briefly in the pages that follow, the overriding whiteness of the book’s corpus calls for some exposition, especially considering the cur­ rent debates regarding the role of monuments in the perpetuation of white supremacist ideology in the United States. As in almost all realms of US culture, the subject of race inescapably intersected with questions concerning the survival of humanity and the poli­ tical and military policies associated with it. Racialized fears were in fact a surprisingly common theme in a number of postwar depictions of the “last man syndrome,” such as The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), a feature film starring Harry Belafonte as a coal miner who is saved from nuclear fallout by a collapsed mine only to discover that he must share the otherwise desolate world with only two other humans: a white woman and man. Racial themes similarly colored numerous examples of postwar science-­fiction literature, as in Ray Bradbury’s short story “Way Up in the Middle of the Air” from his Martian Chronicles (1950), which recounts how blacks living in the American South in the year 2003 began to immigrate to Mars as much to escape persecution as to avoid the threat of nuclear war. The theme of race and nuclear apocalypse also informed the first sentence of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro,” in which the author cites “the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb” as the crucial motivating factor for the (now rather embarrassingly primitivizing) acts of racial appro­ priation of the beat generation. Thus the avowed “end of the world” that so many of the new monuments of postwar US sculpture foretold (however much in the name of its possible perpetuity) may have also—­or only—­signaled the end of the world as white hegemony knows it. As recent the­ orizations associated with the concept of Afro-­pessimism have argued, for the countless lives affected by the powers of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, questions regard­ ing the end of the world, and what precisely constitutes a world, are less prognostic than belated, in that numerous worlds have been ending for centuries and often at the hands of modern Western culture.43 And as Kristin Ross has trenchantly argued in her account of the rise of antihumanist thought in postwar France, the pressures of decolonization crucially informed such visions of the end of man, often rendering the technologically enhanced, posthuman world as one that would relinquish the rights and opportunities for representation (both political and visual) of the very populations that were just beginning to emerge on the political stage.44 Perhaps these visons of “the end of man” 26

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were motivated in part by the threat of what Joanna Zylinska has called “the expiration of the White Christian Man as the key subject of history” and events like decolonization and the civil rights movement posed, along with the inevitable drive toward racial intermixing that Smithson would brilliantly allegorize in his sandbox monument of Passaic (discussed in chapter three), a future planet that would be, if not black, certainly brown. As such the apocalyptic fantasies presented by many of the artists, no matter how powerfully they were grounded in actual technological and political developments, may be understood as ways of not dealing with the necessary political transformations that would make such fears possible in the first place. These fantasies also, as Zylinska reminds us, can be seen “as both a promise and an ethical opening rather than solely an existential threat.”45 This paradoxical dynamic between a sense of catastrophic menace and utopian potential, of new beginnings emerging from anxious ends, is what I hope to chart across the sculptural monumentalism of postwar art in the United States. The first chapter, “The New Sense of Fate,” examines a significant but now largely forgotten body of sculpture created in the decades after the end of World War II and typically associated with the abstract expressionist movement. These works used a range of formal and technical means such as pitted and mottled surfaces (often produced through the relatively novel technique of direct metal welding), irregular and coarse patination, and figural fragmentation to invest the works with signs of simulated dilapidation. The larger existential crisis brought about by the war’s devastation was famously emblematized by the gestural brushstrokes of abstract expressionist painting. But the more specific technological and futurological anxiety at the basis of these fears was most clearly articulated by sculptors of the same period, such as Herbert Ferber, Raoul Hague, Seymour Lipton, and Theodore Roszak (many of whom learned their welding skills during the war at factories producing airplanes and munitions). These artists’ works, with their dual invocations of technological progress and classical ruination, served as strident—­if paradoxical—­harbingers of what the current world would look like after the next war by evoking signs of destruction and dilapidation that were traditionally associated with the archaeological past. The second chapter, “Sculpture and the Weapon,” considers how the welding technique and the incorporation of unconventional materials like steel redirected the tradition of modern sculpture away from a long-­standing classical paradigm predicated on imitation (and the human figure in particular) and toward more nonrepresentational and functional examples of three-­dimensional production such as tools, weapons, and architecture. In fact, many artists such as Lee Bontecou, Ferber, Roszak, and David Smith created sculptures that overtly resembled weaponry, both through their materials and their forms, oftentimes investing these works with a sense of dynamic projection Monumentalism and Method

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that activated the surrounding space in which they were exhibited. Other sculptors like Ibram Lassaw and Peter Grippe produced works that presented an equally spatialized mode of address by encouraging viewers to perceive them from an aerial perspective. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the sort of phenomenological approaches to postwar sculpture typically ascribed to the rise of minimalism in the early 1960s were already well developed in the previous decades, finding a crucial moment of formation in the ­series of exhibitions curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art between 1943 and 1955 (Airways to Peace, The Road to Victory, Power in the Pacific, and most famously The Family of Man), which used sculptural installations of large-­scale mounted photographs to address issues related to warfare. The third chapter, “New Monuments and Reversed Ruins,” addresses the notable renaissance in monumentalism in 1960s sculpture, surveying a range of practices by artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Dan Flavin, and Robert Smithson that often explicitly, if ironically, engaged with the tradition of the monument, investing the form’s spatial expansiveness and its rhetoric of temporality with a decisive sense of ephemerality and erosion. This juxtaposition of time and space would be crucial to Smithson’s conception of what he saw as a “new monumentality” in the art of the 1960s. For Smithson, the new monuments presaged a future environment of bland uniformity brought about by technological development, which, paradoxically, predicted the inevitable end of the human race and the universe. Drawing on the concept of entropy and the ruin, Smithson provided a distinctly nonhuman conception of time and one moreover that transposed the previous generation’s interest in fateful tragedy into a scientific and impersonal system that was nonetheless equally teleological. These visions of a desolated uninhabited world would be material dramatized by earth artists like Smithson and Michael Heizer, whose works seem to expand the oracular function of the previous generation. The fourth chapter, “The Credibility Gap,” reframes the aesthetic project of Donald Judd, one of the most important artists associated with the minimalist movement, considering his oeuvre within the larger discourse of credibility that pervaded American culture in the 1960s (most notably in the so-­called credibility gap that surrounded the debate on the Vietnam War) and the anxiety created by the rapidly expanding role of technology and mediation in everyday life. The chapter considers how the irra­tional illusions Judd’s art caused, often through the use of nontraditional materials such as Plexiglas, coupled with the works’ connotations of industrial and technological fabrication, spoke to a growing fear about uncontrollable technological advancement, which, following such events as the Cuban missile crisis, was colored by a decidedly ­nuclear anxiety. The fifth and final chapter, “The Empty Room,” examines a group of works that through their monumental scale, use of refracted light, and architectonic enclosures encouraged viewers to engage in an expansively spatial manner so that the gallery itself 28

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became an aesthetically charged site. Many of the original viewers of these works experienced these unconventional, frequently austere, and affectless objects and installations as threatening and even aggressive. Drawing on the original reception of some of the most significant public exhibitions of minimal and postminimal art (taking the work of William Anastasi, Robert Barry, Flavin, and Bruce Nauman as key examples), this chapter argues that these works and “environments” (to use a word often invoked around such art) produced experiential situations that served as imaginary figurations of what the world would look and feel like without human inhabitation or if the viewer was the last person on the Earth. By creating works that imagine uninhabitable or empty physical spaces or, through their massive size or spatial expansiveness, encourage a mode of spectatorship and photographic reproduction that occludes other people, these works channeled a larger cultural anxiety concerning the threat of nuclear annihilation that fundamentally inflected, however unconsciously, significant realms of postwar American culture well into the 1970s. I began thinking and writing about the questions that motivate this book in the first years of the twenty-­first century, when I was beginning my professional training as an art historian and the question of war was once again in the forefront of national politics following the attacks by al-­Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and the United States’ subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. If the events of 9/11 represent a sort of fateful denouement of the long-­awaited fear of “terror from the air” that haunted American culture throughout much of the second half of twentieth century, the interminable “war on terror” that has resulted from it can be seen as a continuation of the effects of “total war” that modern, technological war had already established. Writing now, seventeen years later, with no apparent end in sight of such an endless war, the question of how art registers and responds to a society on what President Barack Obama called “permanent war footing” seems particularly pressing, as does the question of what sort of society we want to live in and art’s possible role in the imagining and creation of that desired and hopefully less bellicose and more just future.46

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BROKEN OBELISK (B. NEWMAN)

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F. 4

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CHAPTER ONE THE NEW SENSE OF FATE

History has brought mankind to that pinnacle on which the total obliteration of mankind is at last a practical possibility. . . . The malignant death instinct is a built-­in guarantee that the human experiment, if it fails to attain its possible perfection, will cancel itself out, as the dinosaur experiment canceled itself out. —­n orman

brown ,

Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History

Prophecy based on extension of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is only a doubly involved guess. — vannevar

bush ,

“As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945

It is a foundational tenet of modern art that it be not simply of its moment but also point to an as-­yet-­realized future. This forward-­looking capacity of modernism is perhaps most concisely articulated in the concept of the avant-­garde, a term whose martial etymology typically invests the vanguard artist with connotations of daring heroism if not belligerent confrontation.1 To borrow Robert Louis Stevenson’s notably military-­inflected description of the persistence of memory across the span of an individual’s life, one could state that modern art advances like “an invading army in a barren land,” at once progressing to capture unexplored regions (of experience, knowledge, and technique) while maintaining communication with outposts in “the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.”2 This complex multidirectional temporal dialogue with its historical predecessors and its imagined future successors is emblematized—­again in remarkably a minatory manner—­in Alfred H. Barr’s “torpedo” diagrams that he began drafting in 1941 (fig. 2). Here the “ever-­ advancing” trajectory of modernism (which, according to the image, has made its path into an ever-­expanding dominion of the United States) is tailed by what Barr described in a later version of the diagram from 1964 as the “ever-­receding past of 50–­100 years ago.”3 Yet avant-­ garde paradigms of historical continuity and precursory possibility appeared increasingly tenuous in the years following the end of World War II. Even 31

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Fig. 2. Alfred Barr, “Torpedo” diagrams of the ideal permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, as advanced in 1933 and in 1941, prepared for the “Advisory Committee Report on Museum Collections” (detail), 1941. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York: Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, 9a.15.

though the postwar years in the United States are conventionally seen as a period of conformity and conservatism, these cultural attitudes should be understood as responding to a profound anxiety that threatened to undermine foundational cultural values. According to numerous accounts of the postwar period, the tumult of war and the consequential large-­scale emigration of many leading European artists accounts in large part for the material decimation of the avant-­garde. Likewise, what could be described as the intellectual and psychological aftermath of the war also played a crucial role in the diminishing prospects of future-­oriented artistic visions. Images of the Nazi death camps that began to circulate in the mass media seemed to annul any remaining faith in humanistic aspirations of mankind’s betterment, while the advent of the atomic bomb revealed the darker side of technological innovation and, more unnervingly, threatened to wipe out the future existence of mankind. Henry Miller, who was forced to flee Europe in 1939 and return to the United States, would bleakly diagnose this condition in his 1956 study of Arthur Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins. The book provocatively argues that Rimbaud’s signal importance can be found in his modeling of a new paradigm of humanity for a world with no future. Rimbaud’s art, and perhaps more significantly his life—­his “act or renunciation,” in which the poet notoriously forsook poetry to become an arms dealer—­epitomizes for Miller the crucial recognition of “our own tragic fate,” made recently explicit in “the release of the Atomic bomb.” Asserting a drastic ultimatum that would become increasingly prevalent in the postwar era, Miller declared, “Either, like [Rimbaud], we are going to renounce all that our civilization has stood for thus far, and attempt to build afresh, or we are going to destroy it with our own hands.”4 32

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Many artists working in the wake of the United States’ unleashing of the atomic bomb into the world in 1945 would similarly consider the fundamental implications of the recently—­and permanently—­imperiled future for contemporary art and humanity. Miller’s declaration of Rimbaud as a surrealist prophet and the prototypical twentieth-­ century man resonates alongside Barnett Newman’s unpublished essay written around 1945 titled “Surrealism and the War.” Commending the prewar avant-­garde’s capacity for futurological prognostication and pronouncing its subsequent obsolescence in the wake of the war’s devastating denouement, Newman describes the fantastic deserted landscapes that painters like Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy imagined during the height of surrealism in the 1930s as “prophetic tableaux of what the world was to see as reality. They showed the horror of war; and if men had not laughed at the surrealists, if they had understood them, the war might never have been.” In other words, if prewar viewers had recognized the prophetic capacities of a painting like Ernst’s Europe after the Rain (Wadsworth Atheneum, 1933) a nightmarish rendering of a ruinous and largely unpopulated landscape, then the work wouldn’t now serve as a “ ‘super-­real’ mirror of the world to come, of the world of today,” a world, Newman goes on to state, in which “no painting exists” that could surpass in terms of surrealistic impact the recently published “photographs of German atrocities.”5 For Newman, the surrealists’ unheeded prophecy that was first imagined in the fantastically desolate landscapes of painters like Joan Miró, Ernst, and Tanguy became retrospectively substantiated and documented in photographs of the decimated cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima (as well as Dresden, London, and other places that experienced the devastation of aerial bombardment during the war). As Newman notes in the final paragraphs of an expanded version of the essay published three years later in 1948 as “The New Sense of Fate,” “The war the surrealists predicted has robbed us of our hidden terror, as terror can exist only if the forces of tragedy are unknown. We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. We are no longer, then, in the face of a mystery. After all, wasn’t it an American boy who did it?” For Newman, the massively destructive power of the bomb had dissolved art’s prophetic capacity. By bringing the apocalyptic potential of the bomb into the world, “American boys” stole away forever the uncertainty and possibility from the future, and with it, the aim of the avant-­garde.

A FORSAKEN FUTURE Newman’s essay is primarily a consideration of the beleaguered survival of the classical tradition within modernity, and in particular the vacuity of its ideals of harmonious beauty amid the apparent barbarism of the postwar world, a point he asserts by noting how contemporary artists have “more feeling and consequently more understanding for The New Sense of Fate

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a Marquesas island fetish than for the Greek figure.” Yet even as the deep-­seated “aesthetic standards” that Western culture has inherited from antiquity become increasingly inadequate to address the fateful savagery of a nuclear era, the “tragic subject matter” of Greek drama has become increasingly relevant. Newman argues, Greek tragedy constantly revolves around the sense of hopelessness: that no matter how heroically one may act, no matter how innocent or moral that action may seem, it inevitably leads to tragic failure because of our inability to understand or control the social result.  .  .  . After more than two thousand years we have finally arrived at the tragic position of the Greeks, and we have achieved this Greek state of tragedy because we have at last ourselves invented a new sense of all-­pervading fate, a fate that is for the first time for modern man as real and as intimate as the Greeks’ fate was to them. This is why, according to Newman, “the surrealists have been the only ones who have made a serious and vigorous attempt to revive Greek plasticity and sensibility, within a context of tragic subject matter.”6 With their illusionistic visions of derelict civilizations, oracular artists like Ernst signaled the obsolescence of the classical humanist tradition while simultaneously, if incidentally, revitalizing its fundamental vision of retrospec­ tively consequential (and thus fateful) action. Newman pursued these themes throughout his oeuvre, albeit forgoing the visual lexicon of volumetric plasticity. In his Stations of the Cross series (1958–­66) an eschatological logic pervades the sequence of fourteen canvases marked with the artist’s characteristic vertical “zips,” whose feathered edges, especially when viewed successively from painting to painting, seem to crackle with dramatic expectancy and tragic irresolution (fig. 3). The extensive use of bare canvas and the somber and largely unvarying palette summon the “forsaken” world invoked by the series’ subtitle, Lema Sabachthani, a phrase taken from the Gospel of Matthew, recounting Jesus’s cry from the Cross, “Eli, Eli Lema Sabachthani” (translated as “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?,” but as Matthew’s gospel recounts, misunderstood by some bystanders as Jesus calling for the prophet Elijah).7 In the catalog accompanying the series’ first exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966, Lawrence Alloway noted how the works’ distinctly sequential and participatory mode of address produced a “spatial unity” while their interrelated imagery and allusions to the Christian passion encouraged viewers to “experience [the series] as a unit of fourteen continuous parts.” For Alloway this typological structure served as a “definition that partially determined the future course of the series,” making each iteration of the series “a speculative extensive into the future.” Viewers who approached 34

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Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross, 1958–­66. Installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966.

Fig. 3.

Newman’s canvases as expressive abstractions of fundamental human themes—­what Newman’s contemporaries Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko described as “tragic and timeless”—­could empathetically experience a sense of anticipation and even narratological succession of sorts, albeit with a definite end that revealed no signs of resolution.8 Hung ascending the museum’s signature ramp, the paintings would have emphasized the dramatic expectancy engendered by the series and the staggering lack of redemption or development at its conclusion. Newman’s paintings seemed to suggest the physical performance of the creative act in which the blank canvas was seen as an existential arena of liberatory self-­creation ex nihilo, yet in the artist’s Broken Obelisk (fig. 4) the translation of gestural marks of artistic action and formal incompletion into the medium of sculpture suggests age and decay more than immanent presence and future possibility. The paradoxical dichotomy of a tragically expressive, overturned classical ideal is materialized in the precarious balancing of two elemental monumental forms—­the pyramid and the obelisk—­on each other. In a series of lectures on the subject of tomb sculpture given in 1956 at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, the art historian Erwin Panofsky categorized the Egyptian forms invoked by Newman’s sculpture as distinctively “prospective” monuments in that they performed a “magic manipulation of the future” rather than “the imaginative commemoration of the past” (as in the “retrospective” monuments associated with the Greco-­Roman tradition).9 The obelisk and pyramid have traditionally symbolized the The New Sense of Fate

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Fig. 4. Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963–­66. Installation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

desire to reach beyond the terrestrial realm of mortality toward the celestial sphere of the divine, and with it, the confluence of a human historical past with a transcendent futurity. In Newman’s configuration, though, the conjunction of these priapic structures into symmetrical vertical opposition suggests the collapse of such dichotomies. Unlike the rhetoric of timeless stability typically conveyed by conventional monuments, Newman’s sculpture—­in spite of its size and material—­expresses precariousness and provisionality. The work acknowledges its peripatetic possibility in the coarsely channeled, almost scalloped flame-­cut edges of the base, which appears to hover a few inches off the ground, suggesting that the work has been previously torn from a prior site and thus making explicit the frequent mobility of traditional obelisks that were ­often physically displaced as signs of imperial power such as the many that can still be 36

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seen in European plazas (or, for that matter, Cleopatra’s Needle, situated behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which Newman acknowledged as an inspiration for his work).10 As a few critics noted, when one of the three versions of the Broken Obelisk was exhibited in the Scale as Content exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1967, it was in perceptible dialogue with a modern—­and as-­of-­yet sedentary—­obelisk: the Washington Monument, located a little over a mile away and visible from certain vantage points.11 If the floating base with its signs of forceful displacement signals the uncertainty of earthly power, the sculpture’s startling inversion of the obelisk form insinuates an equally radical transposition of the celestial realm. The jagged, rubble-­like apex of the sculpture (the passage that gives Newman’s monument its titular brokenness) appears twenty-­four feet in the air, where traditionally one would find its skyward-­pointing tip, replacing the signs of divine protection with those of violence coming down from above; the point of the obelisk meets the tip of the pyramid ten feet from the base, imparting a sense of descending gravitational force more than transcendent ascendency. The artist’s use of Corten, a relatively novel steel alloy that exhibits over time a protective crust of permanent rust on its surface, allowed the work to exist in an outdoor setting in a relatively stable condition and also to appear at its moment of creation to have weathered years of prior existence.12 With its two tips aimed directly at and seeming to interpenetrate each other, Broken Obelisk presents a vision of transcendental eternity at ground zero, marking a discrete point of contact between the timeless sublime and the ­earthly present.13 Rather than a symbol of extensive possibility and permanence, the sculpture suggests the sense of predestined fate at the heart of the classical notions of tragedy so crucial to Newman’s aesthetic theory.14 Conceived in 1963, the year after the Cuban missile crisis when the fear of nuclear attack appeared as probable as it ever would, but not executed until 1966 due to the technical challenges of its design, Broken Obelisk does not memorialize the war that preceded it, and, according to Newman, made questions of eternity obsolete, so much as it imagines the war to come in which contact between the sky and earth promised a rain of weaponry rather than divine guidance. In this simulation of the ruinous decay so characteristic of classical statuary and architecture, Broken Obelisk is a monument for a world in which the future seemed more like a distant, nearly prehistorical past than a shining new frontier—­a world before even ancient Egypt or Greece, before time itself when the first humans, and according to Newman, the first artists, roamed the Earth.15 With its potent symbolization of an imperiled civilization and its invocation of the sculptural fragment and public monument, Broken Obelisk was a conspicuous example of a much larger body of modern American sculptures that drew on what could be called an archaeological imagination, one that simultaneously saw The New Sense of Fate

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those sculptures as monuments to an endangered humanity and its cultural legacy and as disjointed shards and dilapidated relics from a yet-­to-­be-­realized but always pending future apocalypse. Indeed, the work in many ways can be seen to represent a culminating moment from an important strand of postwar sculpture that summoned a perverted (and literally inverted) classicism to express, if not prophesy, the dread of a fatal future.

ANTICIPATED DERELICTION In many regards Newman’s Broken Obelisk, with its rough, shard-­like pinnacle, alludes to a long-­standing tradition in modern sculpture at least since Rodin that employed signs of incompletion or fragmentation for expressive effect and historical allusion. This tradition was in fact examined in an exhibition titled The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture, which took place at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1969 soon after Broken Obelisk was first publicly shown in two iterations: at the Corcoran Gallery and outside of the Seagram Building in New York. Charting a genealogy from Rodin to Brancusi to Giacometti to David Smith, the show demonstrated how many sculptors working within modernism’s general trend toward abstraction created works that had both overt and understated allusions to the classical tradition of the monument, whether understood as the nonobjective obelisk or the figurative statue, and its existence in the modern imagination as ruin. In his catalog essay for the exhibition the art historian Albert Elsen notes that “one of the ironies of the modern history of the partial figure is that, since the Second World War, it has become the basis in fact and planning for monumental ­sculptures.”16 Certainly sculpture’s relationship to statuary, and in particular the monument, invested works like Broken Obelisk with a sense of the historical past unavailable in the more forward-­looking paradigm articulated in Barr’s torpedo diagram of modernism and modernist aesthetics more generally, which typically took painting as its principal subject. Sculpture, with its specific connotations of monumental memorialization and classicism, was ideally suited to express the anxiety surrounding the fate of humanity in the postwar environment. Within this temporal logic then, sculpture, understood as the conventional antithesis to painting in the modernist imagination, was generally and possibly even inherently backward-­looking rather than prophetic. One can think of Ad Reinhardt’s memorable, if mean-­spirited, quip (occasionally attributed to Newman) that sculpture was “what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.” Or, for that matter, the story of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt after looking behind her, can be seen to offer a mythological paradigm for sculpture’s fundamental ­hindsightedness. As Rosalind Krauss has argued, modern sculpture rejected the sedimentary placidness of traditional statuary and monuments, yet it was nonetheless “born from classical archeology,” so that even as it became more nomadic and baseless it never wholly lost its 38

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relationship to the statue, or the archaeological fragment.17 According to Leonard Barkan, the fragmented ruin played a central role in the formation of a modern conception of history that conceives of time as continuous and progressive, since every fragment inevitably refers “to some past or future condition in which it was not a fragment.”18 The archaeological fragment, and its simulated modernist iteration, contains within it a complex multidirectional temporality pointing at once back to a past moment of completion and forward to its possible future restoration. This tradition, reaching back to Rodin, if not the Renaissance, found a particularly pronounced articulation in the years following World War II, when the fall and survival of empires, not to mention civilization itself, appeared increasingly in the balance and prophecies of the future seemed to promise a return to a barbaric past (a paradoxical temporality expressed in Albert Einstein’s trenchant prediction in 1949: “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—­rocks!).”19 The rising significance of imaginary archaeological fragmentation in postwar sculpture would be discerned by many critics and art historians. In his introductory essay to the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois annual survey of American art in 1959 the curator Allen Weller asked, “What is the reason that so many contemporary artists have deliberately fashioned their works so that they look old, battered, abused?” Weller goes on to note how “an extraordinary number of such works are made to look as if they were fragments from the past, objects which have been excavated and worked upon by the corrosive elements of time. This is often the case in recent sculpture, in which the pitted surfaces, the subtle shifting variations of color and texture (deliberately created), remind us inevitably of the chance effects often observed in bronzes which have been excavated after being buried for centuries in earth or sea.”20 Another critic, writing almost ten years before Weller, described the “rusty surfaces” of David Smith’s sculptures as suggesting that they were “recovered from a watery grave by a diver in search of the ruins of Atlantis.”21 The art historian and occasional critic Leo Steinberg also recognized this tendency, writing that “the look of ancient ravaged sculpture, disinterred, bronze-­diseased or stippled by internal rust has charmed many contemporary sculptors.” Reviewing the work of four sculptors—­Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, Jose de Rivera, and Raoul Hague—­ shown in the Museum of Modern Art’s 12 Americans exhibition in 1956, Steinberg saw these artists engaging in a tradition of classic revivalism that emphasized the non-­finito, as practiced by such luminaries as Michelangelo and Rodin, in which “recovered antique statuary is not reimagined for how it had once looked, or what it had once represented, but when perfection is projected into its actual truncated state.” Steinberg focuses his analysis on the work of Hague, whose carved hardwood trunks, he claimed, resemble an “atrial humanity” whose “catastrophic breaks” the critic finds “vaguely disturbing.” The New Sense of Fate

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Fig. 5. Raoul Hague, Ohayo Wormy Butternut, 1947–­48. Butternut, 66½ × 19¼ × 13¾ in. (168.9 × 48.9 × 35 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Katharine Cornell Fund. (248.1956)

Using words that could just as easily describe Broken Obelisk, Steinberg writes that works such as Hague’s present a vision of a classical sculpture “that has come to grief, whose skin has been scarred and bruised, whose terminations are not shapely but grotesque accidents of destruction, whose optimism, in short, has outlasted its agony.”22 Hague’s sculptures, typically titled after the type of wood used and the location where it was found, seemed to insinuate the gradual processes of material dilapidation through their apparently fragmentary figures and overt display of wormholes and cracks. 40

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In Ohayo Wormy Butternut (fig. 5), for instance, the sculptor accentuates the natural cavities and crevices in his chosen material through his rough facture in which chisel marks are left visible and, more explicitly, by producing a form that suggests a fragmentary classical sculpture whose arms and head are missing. Even the sections where the artist decided to fill certain larger cracks with putty only accentuate the sense of natural decay and historical passage, simulating restoration efforts at the very inception of the work. This is perhaps most striking in the figure’s left knee, where a large circle of putty covers a knot in the wood that was likely where a smaller stem emerged from the branch. By mounting the work so that the branches stemming off from the trunk now serve as leglike appendages, Hague inverts the growth direction of the wood, suggesting a similar, if much more subtle, descendent trajectory as in Broken Obelisk. Moreover, like Broken Obelisk, Hague chiseled the top of the sculpture, highlighting the sense of incompletion throughout the piece and leading Steinberg to interpret these humanoid fragments that appear “broken in mid-­body by some mindless chance, yet clinging so tenaciously to its task,” as “a new symbol for man whose objective is not easy living but precarious survival.”23 ARTnews editor Tom Hess presented a similar interpretation in his brief essay in the 12 Americans catalog, claiming that the pruned anthropomorphism of the sculptures, inspired by the “classic marbles which Hague studied so carefully in Greece and Egypt”—­the artist was born in Constantinople in 1904 and lived there and in Egypt before coming to the United States in 1921—­provides a trenchant illustration of “an age that cannot deal in certainties.”24 For these critics, Hague’s sculpture with its conjunction of classicism, ruination, and manual craftsmanship figured a technological civilization on the brink of catastrophic decline. Four years later, in 1960, Steinberg recognized a similar imaginary projection of a world of derelict objects devoid of human supervision in the work of Jasper Johns. Like the sculpture of Hague, Johns’s art from this period, such as Flag and Target with Four Faces, contained multiple signs of simulated decay: the tattered edges of the outdated newspapers that constituted the ground of so many of his canvases (fig. 6), the uneven surfaces and mottled patina of the sculptures like Flashlight (fig. 7), which emerged from a rocklike base like some ancient, half-­excavated artifact, and perhaps most similar to Hague, the fragmentary plaster casts that appeared in the small cabinets atop two of his most well-­known target paintings. Many early critics of Johns’s art besides Steinberg similarly identified this sense of derelict neglect, oftentimes aligning it with classical ­allusions, in many ways as evident in the work of Hague. Harold Rosenberg described the works as “parodies of antique sculptural fragments,” while Irving Sandler noted their resemblance to “a fragment of classical sculpture.” Fairfield Porter made this connection most explicitly, seeing the sculptural component of Johns’s works “as deathly as the castings made from the holes in the lava and ash of Herculaneum and Pompeii.”25 The New Sense of Fate

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Fig. 6. Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955. Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surmounted by four tinted-­plaster faces in wood box with hinged front, 335⁄8 × 26 × 3 in. (85.3 × 66 × 7.6 cm), overall with box open. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull. (8.1958) Fig. 7. Jasper Johns, Flashlight III, 1958 (cast 1987). Bronze, glass, and aluminum paint, 51⁄8 × 81⁄8 × 3¾ in. (13 × 20.6 × 9.5 cm). Private collection, promised gift to The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Although Steinberg did not invest his description of Johns’s art with the sort of classical allusions he invoked in his discussion of Hague, he frequently identified a powerfully elegiac strand running through the artist’s oeuvre, which oftentimes portrayed the works as artifacts of an ancient and now vanished civilization. Highlighting what he took to be the almost accusatory indifference of Johns’s painterly facture, the way it seemed to negate the expressionist tradition of artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Steinberg described works such as Flag and Target with Four Faces as presenting a radical and rather shocking vision of a transformed relationship between people and things. “What we see when we face a Johns commonplace is the possibility of a changed attitude; better still, the possibility of an object’s lone self-­existence without any human attitude whatsoever surrounding it . . . these handmade, uniquely made commonplace things are relieved of man’s shadow.”26 In another essay from the same year, the critic repeatedly asserted the stark disavowal imagined by these works, writing that “it was as if the subjective consciousness, which alone can give meaning to ‘here’ and ‘there,’ had ceased to exist,” as if “the values that would make a face seem more precious or eloquent [than an object] had ceased to exist; as if those who could hold and impose such values just weren’t around.” Steinberg’s reading of these works corresponds with the still dominant postmodern interpretations of Johns’s early output as radical critiques of conceptions of univer42

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sal and normative subjectivity, so that the work’s apparent obliteration of “here” and “there” reveals the vacuity of notions of individual interiority and personal expression. Yet the critic’s comments when read alongside his essay on Hague as well other accounts of Johns’s art that emphasize its allusions to archaeological fragments suggest a more material basis for the powerful affective presence of these works. Steinberg compared this “implication of . . . human absence from a man-­made environment” to “a dead city of terrible familiarity. Only objects are left—­man-­made signs which, in the absence of men, have become objects. And Johns has anticipated their dereliction.”27 By turning images and signs (such as letters, numbers, and flags) into things, Johns invested these motifs with a material fragility and even mortality that they did not have in their conventional manifestations that typically privileged their conceptual existence.28 Johns’s highly worked-­over numbers and letters, with their multiple layers of paint and collage elements and their oftentimes rough surfaces and uneven patination, exhibit a material decay and deterioration that is inconceivable in their daily invocations as spoken words, mental concepts, and even written forms. The suggestions of physical decay and ruination, if not human extinction, rendered in the cracks and wormholes of Hague’s sculptures as well as in the uneven surfaces and impassive facture of Johns’s works (both pictorial and sculptural) are based on the way that their generally smoothed and pliable materials and respective techniques of carving, casting, and modeling connote a certain organicism and naturalness. The old-­fashioned brass hinges and cracked wooden panels at the top of two of Johns’s best-­known target paintings insinuate the components as well as the patina of some old chest of drawers in an attic or leftovers from a rural hardware store.29 The conservator Carol Mancusi-­ Ungaro has noted how the wood used in Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts bears the traces of “former use” in its “extraneous holes and nicks.”30 Similarly, the deep fractures and wormholes on the surfaces of many of Hague’s sculptures complicates the artist’s various acts of carving by situating them alongside the processes of natural decay. Many of the materials used by Hague and Johns—­wood, wax, plaster, oil—­emphasize the works’ respective evocations of what could be called antiquatedness by natural causes. As Alois Riegl notes in his celebrated essay on monuments, such signs of natural dilapidation suggest a “calm, lawful continuity” congruent with the establishment of what he calls the object’s “age value” (its public estimation based on its historical longevity). Unlike the jagged apex and scalloped base of Broken Obelisk with its signs of what Riegl describes as “sudden, violent destruction,” the simulated dereliction of Johns’s and Hague’s works seems to be the result of gradual wear or long-­term neglect rather than through some violent act of destruction.31 Indeed, the highly synthetic balance at the crux of Newman’s sculpture, fabricated by an industrial firm out of large sheets of Corten steel and certainly the most technically complex aspect of the work, epitomizes the work’s absolute The New Sense of Fate

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defiance of natural laws. While the works of Johns and Hague evoked the relics of some ancient civilization or the last objects left standing within a desolate city, Broken Obelisk, through its invocations of industrial machinery and materials and its visible signs of violent force, captured the precarious relationship with technology that made such archaeological associations newly relevant in the postwar years, aligning a technological present with a barbaric prehistoric past to predict a desolate future. Steinberg The paradoxical anticipated dereliction insinuated by Johns’s art—­ described the works in one essay from 1962 as conveying “a sense of desolate waiting”—­ was primarily produced by what the critic called their “totally nonhuman point of view.”32 Hague’s sculptures materialized the signs of natural deterioration and human neglect, forging an imagined past onto the actual history of his chosen material of hardwood tree trunks; Johns’s paintings with their poker-­faced presentations of literal signs—­what the artist described as “things the mind already knows”—­brought these emblems of dereliction into the present tense and even a possible future.33 This sense of immediacy is evident in Steinberg’s declaration that in works like Flag it is as if “no one is pointing at anything in particular, perhaps because no one is around.”34 Like Mike Ferris, the air force pilot protagonist of “Where Is Everybody?,” the inaugural episode of the television series The Twilight Zone, which first aired October 2, 1959, who dreams that he is the only person left in a world that nonetheless contains multiple signs of human habitation such as a boiling coffee urn and a burning cigar in an ashtray, viewers of Johns’s flags and targets were given an uncanny presentation of a world that seemed evacuated from human contact yet retained all the signs of human interaction, still functional but eerily so. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Steinberg in his essay “Contemporary Art and the Plight of the Public,” first given as a lecture at MoMA in 1960, declares that modern art like Johns’s “projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed.”35 While the unhinged values declared by the affectless surfaces of Johns’s art exemplify their art historical status as prototypical examples of postmodernism, the works’ ­appearance in the precarious postwar world, it could be argued, made such contingency critically explicit like never before. Endangered humanity projected into a perilous future was in many ways the central theme of the sculpture of Peter Grippe. Although now largely unknown even among many specialists in postwar art of the United States, in the 1940s and ’50s Grippe occupied a significant position within what was seen at the time to be an increasingly vibrant realm of sculptural practice. In a 1947 review of recent trends in modern sculpture published in Harper’s Bazaar, the curator James Thrall Soby distinguished David Smith and Grippe as “two of the most respected sculptors of the newer generation.”36 Indeed, Grippe was something of a central figure in the New York art scene of the 1940s, avowedly the “originator of the pictograph” motif, which inspired Newman’s 1947 essay 44

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Fig. 8. Peter Grippe, City #3, 1947. Terra-­cotta, 23 × 19 × 13 in. (58.4 × 48.3 × 33 cm). Allentown Art Museum.

“The Ideographic Image” and defined the early work of Adolph Gottlieb in which symbols from what the painter called “our pre-­historic past” serve as “the expression of a ­neurosis . . . when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint.”37 Grippe first came to public attention in the mid-­1940s with a series of terra-­cotta cities in which gently curved architectonic planes are stacked one atop another and vacillate between human faces and building facades (fig. 8). Grippe’s skillful ability to (as he put it) “suspend . . . most of these masses in mid-­air,” stacking the malleable strata of clay into gravity-­defying edifices, expressed a sense of precariousness that he continued to explore in his investigation of the lost wax technique, beginning around 1944, in which he The New Sense of Fate

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Fig. 9.

Peter Grippe, City #3 (detail).

developed a chemical formula that would allow him to construct “large, intricate space constructions that would not collapse under the weight of suspended forms or changes in temperature.”38 Prefiguring Johns’s plaster cast faces, the facades of Grippe’s cities flicker between human presence and a sense of desolation. This sense of barrenness is made explicit when the work is viewed from above, revealing the complex arteries of the work’s structure as well as its hollow emptiness (fig. 9). Howard Devree, the arts critic for the New York Times, described Grippe’s Growth after Destruction from 1944 as presenting a world in which nature is depicted “taking over somewhere after man has been eradicated, perhaps an idea suggested by war’s ruinous course.”39 This engagement with the theme of instability, in both its material—­and distinctly gravitational—­and memorial implications, would be boldly conveyed in the artist’s inscription of various graffiti-­like symbols on the terra-­cotta surface of his city sculptures, including, most notably, a range of historical dates. Grippe wrote that when he created his first City in 1942 “the war in Europe and fear for the future  .  .  . led me to inscribe my sculpture with dates of such meaningful events in history.” A precarious time capsule of sorts, Grippe’s City registered the particularly acute anxiety that emerged during World War II surrounding the possible destruction of civilization and its monuments.40 This aspect of the work is arguably most powerfully figured in the intriguing if incidental composition offered by the overhead view of the work, which summons the perspective of aerial bombardment and especially photojournalistic depictions of cities during the war. Following the dropping of two atomic bombs by the United States to end the war in Japan, the vision of devastated cities conjoined a fear for the survival of 46

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the past with the fear for the persistence of the future. This complex temporal imagination would be played out in Grippe’s subsequent cities in which he began inscribing dates long succeeding the year of the work’s creation alongside the historical dates, an aspect the artist described as an “affirmation of faith in the future; inscribing dates that were yet to come.”41 The litany of years encourages viewers to project their thoughts forward as well as backward in time and to consider the possible fate of civilization alongside its historical accomplishments. In 1955 Grippe articulated the material—­and distinctly military—­motivations for his art’s engagement with the survival of humanity, writing that he saw his work as “a protest against a society which has become callused and self-­destructive” due in large part to our “threatened extermination by atomic missiles,” which had led many artists to abandon “positive and human values.”42 Grippe claimed that his interest in working with relatively fragile media like clay and wood was influenced by the precarious sense of the future, stating that he felt, “what’s the sense of working in durable materials, we’re going to be blown to smithereens anyway? Let’s use materials that are not really stable.”43 The simulated graffiti that covered his cities symbolized an endangered historical tradition that motivated his declarations of faith in “positive human values,” as did, it could be argued, the artist’s initial decision to work in terra-­cotta as opposed to more strong and durable sculptural media like welded and forged metal, which most sculptors of the period explored almost exclusively (one can think of the work of David Smith as exemplary in this regard). Inscribing dates such as 1776 and 1914 on terra-­cotta forms resembling pre-­Columbian artifacts (the artist claimed he was inspired by East Indian sculpture in the collection of the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo), Grippe produced a sort of futurist primitivism to ponder the fate of a barbaric modern society, one that threatened to become no society at all but instead a world of material objects existing without human subjects.44

SENTINELS, PROPHETS, AND CLIFFHANGERS The forthcoming dates inscribed on Grippe’s cities make the works’ futurological imagination precise and unambiguous. Other sculptors, many of whom were working with the relatively novel technique of direct metal welding (first practiced and popularized by Julio González and Pablo Picasso in the late 1920s), explicitly asserted their art’s engagement with a sense of perilous expectancy through the motif of the sentinel. In fact, “sentinel” was one of the most common titles given to sculptures in the immediate postwar period. According to Henry Miller, modern poets like Rimbaud can be considered “the sentinels who appear from nowhere in the darkest hours of night,” presaging larger societal transformations in their prophetic art. In a similar manner, these The New Sense of Fate

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David Smith, Sentinel I, 1956. Steel, 895⁄8 × 167⁄8 × 225⁄8 in. (227.6 × 42.9 × 57.5 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of the Collectors Committee. (1979.51.1)

Fig. 10.

sculptural sentinels were responsive receivers of and defenders against that “darkest hour” summoned by Miller, when the possibility of humanity’s self-­destruction seemed increasingly probable.45 This antenna-­like receptiveness is evident in the series of nine Sentinels David Smith created between 1956 and 1961 in which pieces of forged and welded steel, often bearing the traces of their previous existence as machinery parts and architectural elements, are composed into daunting anthropomorphic structures typically rising over seven feet in the air (fig. 10). Like Grippe’s cities, these works sculpturally dramatize the 48

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David Smith, Australia, 1951. Painted steel, 6 ft. 7½ in. × 8 ft. 117⁄8 in. × 161⁄8 in. (201.9 × 274 × 41 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of William Rubin. (1533.1968) Fig. 11.

precarious defiance of gravity. Smith’s irregular arrangement of projecting and teetering forms repeatedly culminates in a headlike apex that reaches above human sightlines. Smith vividly emphasized this sense of gravity-­defying levitation in the numerous photographs he took of his sculptures in the rolling hillsides surrounding his studio in Bolton Landing, New York (fig. 11). Positioning the camera in such a way as to present a significant portion of the work against the sky and often capturing the works against a The New Sense of Fate

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Seymour Lipton, Sentinel, 1948. Sheet lead, 16 × 15½ × 6 in. (40.6 × 39.4 × 15.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of the artist, 1986. (1986.276.2)

Fig. 12.

monochromatic snowy background, the sculptures seem to hover off the ground and fly into the space.46 Like Smith’s Tanktotem series from around the same period, the titles of these works suggest overt militaristic connotations. In fact the term “Sentinel” was used to describe an array of military technologies from long-­range missiles to the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, a series of radar stations installed along the northern­most extremes of North America in 1957 that would hopefully provide the first signal of a possible missile or air strike from the Soviet Union.47 With their large, looming bearing it certainly wasn’t hard to imagine Smith’s sculptures, especially when sited in the semiarchaic domain of his rural pastures, as keeping watch for some impending event in the distance, whether spatial or temporal. Other sculptors also channeled such cautionary aspects of the sentinel motif, creating works that conveyed a certain sense of menace both in their larger-­than-­human scale and jagged, metal outcroppings. Seymour Lipton made such weighty and solemn matters the basis of his postwar sculptural output. With its hideous eye shape, Lipton’s Sentinel from 1948 makes its apotropaic connotations explicit, appearing as something 50

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Seymour Lipton, Prophet, 1957. Nickel-­silver on Monel metal, height 90 in. (228.6 cm). Location unknown.

Fig. 13.

halfway between a seedpod and a disused weapon (the oculus serving as a sort of target sight) (fig. 12). Forged from lead, the work’s rutted and ruffled surface infers a sense of dereliction on its uncannily organic form. Perhaps influenced by Smith, Lipton produced two more large sentinel sculptures in 1959; around the same time he also created works with such titles as Herald, Defender, and Prophet, suggesting his broader engagement in the postwar sculptural “sentinelism” (fig. 13). Lipton described Prophet in notably temporal terms, as figuring a “strident person” who “challenge[s] . . . the present world to be careful” and “to become involved in a whole new language of form belonging to the present age.”48 Inspired by the biblical Isaiah who envisioned swords being beaten into plowshares, the work takes the respectively military-­inflected technology and materials of welded steel and transforms them into an ominous portent of the wages of war. Lipton saw the work as “warning man to come to his senses, away from evil and strife, towards peaceful understanding of men.”49 The sculpture’s slight slant coupled with its fin-­like forms and the corkscrew protuberance emerging from its middle invest The New Sense of Fate

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the lizard-­like figure with a sense of forward motion tempering its allusions to primordial forces and worn antiquities with an almost futurist dynamism. Lipton’s multitemporal and oftentimes violent vision of sculpture was already in place by 1947 when he claimed to have discovered “the Paleozoic in man,” in which “the dinosaur and its bones have come alive,” and the “old bones are moving again in a new body, a new organism.”50 According to the artist these works were part of a larger interest in “Mayan and Aztec death ritual sculptures,” which exemplified “the hidden destructive forces below the surface in man.”51 Perfecting a technique in which evenly pooled splotches of molten metal were welded onto bent and forged sheets in organic forms, Lipton, like many other artists of his generation, channeled a romantic myth of a primal humanity to address the traumas of a postwar world. Indeed, for many artists working in welded metal, the characteristically mottled surfaces and blotchy patina of their works suggested a metallic analogue not so much to the gestural brushstroke of their painter peers (which was commonly noted by critics at the time) as to the distressed surfaces of Hague’s wooden sculptures, evoking the effects of oxidation if not outright ruination. The welding torch transformed the practice of sculpture, allowing the artist to work largely alone in his studio, becoming an existential hero (again like the fabled action painter) who could reconnect with primal drives and forces that more complicated and refined sculptural methods such as carving and casting impeded. For painters and sculptors alike this summoning of what was seen to be an unbridled and oftentimes violent primitivism could express the traumatic aftermath of the war while simultaneously defying the dreaded conformism of an industrialized or totalitarian society.52 Yet unlike painting, whose fundamental and arguably inescapable associations with fine art tempered the rhetoric of violence summoned by the drips, ­slashes, and blurs on the canvas, welded metal seemed to conjoin the power and directness of primitive culture with signs of contemporary technology. If, as William Seitz noted in his account of the new sculpture, the “liberation of sculpture from imitation . . . opened civilized eyes to the validity and beauty of primitive and prehistoric sculpture,” it also brought signs of the recent industrialized world into the rarefied realms of the museum and gallery.53 In the welding torch the power of primeval natural forces met the savagery of modern warfare. Combining the fantasy of archaeological dereliction with imagery that would be at home in the realms of postwar science fiction, these artists produced some of the most overt—­and occasionally melodramatically hysterical—­expressions of the fear and expectancy that were associated with humanity’s relationship to technology in the postwar years. As Time magazine put it in in its overview of the new sculpture in 1959, “These objects a few decades from now may be back on the junk heap, or they may prove to have been the testing ground for a new way of seeing in an age of electronics, supersonics and atomic power.”54 52

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Theodore Roszak, Guardian of the Sea II, 1953. Steel. Dimensions unknown. Location unknown.

Fig. 14.

In his equally experimental and technically adroit explorations into direct metal sculpture, Theodore Roszak frequently combined signs of the ruinous primordial and the technologically futuristic. In Sea Sentinel (Guardians of the Sea) from 1956, five insectoid legs emerge from a coral or rocklike base that supports a menacing claw-­shaped head (fig. 14). The artist claimed that the work was created in response to the American test bombing of the Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, an event that notoriously polluted the The New Sense of Fate

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surrounding waters near the Marshall Islands and fatally poisoned many crewmembers of the Lucky Dragon, a nearby fishing boat. Roszak expanded on these associations in an interview from 1956 in which he described the work as a “sentinel of the seas for all the destruction that has happened as a result of our atomic war that not only destroyed life, but polluted the waters.”55 As in Lipton’s prophetic sculptures (and Smith’s more restrained modernist totems), these mythic, prehistoric allusions are aligned with strong technological if not futurological signs, evident in their robotic appendages and, more importantly, their use of welded metal, which in the years following the war was ­often associated with industrial machinery and airplanes in particular. (In fact, Roszak, like many of the postwar artists associated with direct metal welding, learned his skills during the war at a munitions factory, the Brewer Aircraft Corporation in Newark, New Jersey.) Set on a small base that invests its insectoid claws with a sense of colossal scale, Sea Sentinel suggests the sort of frighteningly primeval future imagined in the 1954 movie Them, in which a colony of giant, irradiated ants emerges from the New Mexico desert and attacks Los Angeles. This dark apocalyptic vision of the postatomic future—­and the imagined obsolescence of Roszak’s work within such a future—­was described by one critic reviewing the artist’s exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1957: “It may be that fear is so endemic in this nuclear age that it is bound to outweigh man’s nobler traits as material for art. But if these latter again assert themselves in art, as they have in other terrifying time[s], one may wonder just how horrendous creations such as Roszak’s will look to people of that hoped-­for day.”56 Other critics described this double temporality of Roszak’s art as “having a timeless quality—­at once echoes of a remote past and harbingers of the future.”57 In a twelve-­page color spread dedicated to the “hair-­raising” and “upsetting” new sculpture in the popular picture magazine Look, artists like Roszak were described as sensing “the struggle of mammoth forces in the modern world, with man shrinking in the total reckoning,” so that their sculptures contain “shapes suggesting life that might have been on earth before man and might be tough enough to survive him.”58 As another critic wrote of Roszak’s work noted, “everywhere is the image of the phoenix, the sense of something quite beautiful and enchanted, something of powerful grace magically evolving out of the ashes of destruction and degeneration.”59 The exposed rusty surfaces of these works, like the simulated ruination caused by the dripped and pools of molten metal in other sculptors’ work, summoned the afterlives of weaponry in a postwar world. A poem written by the American military historian Marcus Cunliffe, in response to Roszak’s well-­known sculpture Spectre of Kitty Hawk (fig. 15), presents an entropic vision of industry in which a series of deserted military vessels such as war tanks and twisted guns along with more general mechanical objects such as “wheels and cogs, wire, cable, sides or iron” predict the slow death of metal. 54

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Theodore Roszak, Spectre of Kitty Hawk, 1946–­47. Welded and hammered steel brazed with bronze and brass, 40¼ × 18 × 15 in. (102.2 × 45.7 × 38.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. (16.1950)

Fig. 15.

These “ghosts for our time,” to invoke the title of the poem, reveal this slow disintegration forming “a million unmarked monuments going back to earth.”60 As a specter the sculpture imagines not only how the invention of aviation has haunted modern civilization through its elaboration into a form of warfare, but also more frighteningly, how this haunting will continue into the future. Works like Spectre of Kitty Hawk are what Johannes von Moltke has termed “proleptic ruins,” anticipating the very destruction figured on their surfaces.61 Howard Nemerov vividly expressed these darker connotations of welded sculpture in a short poem inspired by Smith’s Four Soldiers (see fig. 28), which was published in the catalog that accompanied the artist’s exhibition at the Willard Gallery in 1952. In it ­Nemerov describes the artist’s chosen materials as “the odd / Detritus of an iron age gone wrong,” and declares that “it is the warfare of the world” that “weathers” the figures, and that “this ruin alone is glory.”62 The New Sense of Fate

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The metal forms, often in Roszak’s art as redolent of industrial machinery as of ­organic fragments, coupled with the binding and scoring powers of the welding torch, could at once figure the technological basis of the destruction and the prehistorical barbarism that such devastation might foretell. The artist stated that he wanted his works to serve as “blunt reminders of primordial strife and struggle, reminiscent of those brute forces that not only produce life, but in turn threaten to destroy it.”63 Despite its capacity to produce bulbous nodules and complex armatures of drips, Roszak considered the welding torch as much an instrument of deconstruction as accretion and amalgamation. The artist described his decision to abandon the precise and elegant constructivist sculptures he was producing in the years before his discovery of the welding torch in the mid-­1940s as a decidedly regressive act. In a statement he delivered at a symposium related to an exhibition titled The New Sculpture, which took place at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952, Roszak recalled that “when World War 2 came to an end I already knew that the constructivist gears had shifted, and from my point of view, the whole structure took off!—­in reverse—­leaving devastation in its wake.”64 Reacting to the trauma of the war, and in particular to the way that modern technology had been marshaled in the name of military violence, Roszak inverted the conventional trajectory of modernism, paradoxically creating works that imagine a future that would resemble a primordial past. The futurological implications of the sentinel motif, and in particular its associations with the challenge of existence brought about by atomic technology, were allegorized in Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel,” written in 1948 but not published until 1951 (the story appeared in multiple anthologies and served as the basis for the author’s 1968 collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey). The tale concerns a geologist taking part on an expedition to the Moon in the year 1996 who notices a “­metallic glitter” on a mountain ridge and decides to set off to climb the promontory to investigate. Once there he discovers a “glittering, roughly pyramidal structure, twice as high as a man” situated on a smooth and apparently artificially rendered plateau and surrounded by a spherical force field. Because of his knowledge of lunar natural history the narrator recognizes that this notably sculptural object was not an artifact from a previous lunar civilization but rather some sort of “machine” placed there by interstellar explorers who recognized the potential for intelligent life on Earth many millennia before humans appeared on the planet (the story states that life was dying on the Moon as it was just beginning on Earth). The structure, the narrator posits, was placed on the Moon rather than the Earth because “its builders were not concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive—­by crossing space and so escaping from the Earth, our cradle.” After breaking through the invisible protective shield “with the savage might of atomic power,” the “beacon,” which for ages had “been patiently signaling the fact 56

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that no one had discovered it,” is activated, alerting far-­off regions of the universe of the presence of a technologically advanced society on Earth and leaving humanity in the position of waiting for a response as much from the future as in the future. Clarke’ story, with its multiple references to “the conquest of atomic energy” and mankind’s “choice between life and death,” reveals how the sentinel motif served as a powerful symbol for futurological prognostication, especially as it concerned the technological implications of the fate of humanity.65 Like the sentinels of Smith, Lipton, and Roszak, the beacon in Clarke’s story exhibits a monumental cross-­temporality similar to Newman’s Broken Obelisk (whose pyramidal base the lunar sentinel resembles) in which signs of a past are allied an ever-­ advancing and threatening future. Equally important, Clarke’s sentinel emphasizes the ideal of communication across time into an unknown future that would inform so much of the sculpture of the 1940s and ’50s. These were works, it could be argued, that were created for a future audience that did not yet exist, that in fact could not exist. As simulated relics from a future and final war, these sentinels imagine their existence in a world devoid of humans altogether. Despite their creators’ frequent declarations that these sentinels and prophets may, through their daunting signs of dereliction and re-­creations of organic processes, have the capacity to avert the fateful apocalypse awaiting the denizens of the nuclear era, these very same signs of dereliction and protozoan nature intimated a message not received in time, a dwindling faith in their apotropaic functions to stave off future planetary destruction. These sculptures were created in a world that had appeared to cross an irrevocable transom, one in which, as Newman stated, “we now know the terror to expect,” in which signs of primordial organicism suggested not so much the beginnings but the end of life.66 Appraising the condition of humanity’s planetary adeptness, the sentinel in Clarke’s story, like so many of the sculptural sentinels and prophets of the postwar period, can be seen to cast judgment on its spectators, thus reversing the conventional aesthetic dynamics of modern art. It is not surprising, then, that many critics found these works to be aggressive, threatening, and oftentimes morbidly theatrical. Despite the bleak and strident sentiments these works at times expressed, MoMA curator James Thrall Soby argued in the introductory essay for a 1959 survey of recent three-­dimensional work that they represented a sculptural renaissance. He wrote that a group of young artists and, he notes, “some of the senior prophets,” have reconsidered the medium, once considered to be more “atavistic miracle” than autonomous object.67 Yet Soby’s claims for the inno­ vative modernism of this resurgence in sculpture were discounted by works such as Oliver Andrews’s Protector (1958), Abe Saturo’s The Ark (1957), Marion Jacob’s Totem (1957), and Lipton’s Prophet, whose titles alone suggest the continuing engagement with sculpture’s ritualistic functions, a tradition that found its most popular manifestation in The New Sense of Fate

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Robert Mallary, Broome Street, 1961. Mixed technique with polyester on plywood, 85 × 49 in. (215.9 × 124.5 cm). Allan Stone Collection, New York.

Fig. 16.

the wave of major sculptural commissions for synagogues in the 1950s, in which artists like Lipton, Ferber, and Lassaw created religious imagery that, through iconography like the Burning Bush and the technical possibilities of welded metal, figured the continued promise of an ancient covenant between God and his people after the horrors of the Holocaust (and, in a postnuclear era, suggested the promise of life after such a war, of being “burned but not consumed” by fire).68 These religious works, which were produced after these artists had already developed their signature styles, make explicit the rhetoric of prophecy and apocalypse that motivated a great deal of sculptural production in the years following World War II. They were also equally on display in the Recent Sculp-

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Robert Mallary, In Flight, 1957. Wood, dust, sand, and synthetic polymer resin on painted plywood, 43½ × 795⁄8 × 43⁄8 in. (110.4 × 202.2 × 11.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund. (15.1959) Fig. 17.

ture exhibition in which welded metal’s capacity to generate agglomerated and mottled surfaces further underscored the sort of “atavistic” connotations Soby dismissed. This “horrid fascination with decay,” noted in the review of Soby’s show in Time magazine, arguably found its ultimate articulation two years later in another exhibition at MoMA, The Art of Assemblage, which surveyed the use of traditionally nonartistic materials from cubist collage to Smith’s welded sculpture and the neo-­Dada of artists such as Rauschenberg and Johns.69 Writing in the lengthy catalog essay, William Seitz identified a sense of “malaise” motivating this “current wave of assemblage.” Many of the works included in the show seemed to the curator as “fearfully dark, evoking horror or nausea: the anguish of the scrap heap; the images of charred bodies that keep Hiroshima and Nagasaki before our eyes.”70 This morbid anthropomorphism in many ways defined the work of Robert Mallary, an artist represented in both Recent Sculpture USA and The Art of Assemblage and whose work, according to the artist, is “suggested by old walls, encrusted and peeling paint and the erosion and fractured configurations of sidewalks and streets.”71 This is certainly evident in Broome Street, Mallary’s contribution to The Art of Assemblage show (fig. 16), which offers a vision of a ruinous urban milieu only hinted at in Jasper Johns’s targets. Similarly, Mallary’s In Flight (fig. 17), The New Sense of Fate

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included in the earlier show at MoMA, appears to come apart at its seams before one’s eyes, with fragments of splintered wood and sawdust seemingly suspended on the supporting board. Fabricated by affixing urban detritus—­what the artist called “bits and pieces of the city itself”—­with the novel material of plastic resin, which the artist applied wearing what the critic for Life magazine described as “ ‘a man-­from-­the-­moon’  mask,” Mallary’s art engaged in a similar cross-­temporality of postwar sentinelism in which traces of dereliction met with a dystopian, science-­fiction future. In fact, he created his own variation on the sentinel theme in 1961, a nearly four-­foot cruciform structure hung on the wall in which a rusty pipe supports a tangle of metal scraps, including a twisted web of wiring and corrugated cardboard, all covered with a resin-­coated patina that suggests the rough surface and coloration of oxidation.72 The material basis for these morbid and traumatic connotations was never far from Mallary’s mind, as the signs of violent destruction and ruinous decay in his work were directly informed by the precarious circumstances of the postatomic age in which they were produced. As he stated in an interview published in ARTnews in 1964, “We live in a hair-­trigger situation in which hundreds of millions could be extinguished within minutes by a rain of nuclear warheads. These misgivings and anxieties are not going to be kept out of my work—­that’s all. They are going to get in!”73 “The threat of thermonuclear war” was, according to the artist, a subject he was avowedly “fanatical” about.”74 Works like Sentinel and In Flight simultaneously imagine the possible demolition of the urban environment and serve as cautionary prophecies against such a fate. Mallary similarly explored the question of the inevitable self-­destructivity of humanity in Cliffhangers, a large, multipart sculpture he produced for the 1964 World’s Fair (fig. 18). Hung on the exterior of Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion Theaterama Building alongside ten other works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Ellsworth Kelly, and, albeit briefly, Andy Warhol (whose 13 Most Wanted Men was notoriously censored by the fair’s organizers), Cliffhangers diverged from its generally colorful and hard-­edged counterparts in numerous ways, not least of which being its specific engagement with its architectural setting, leading to its being praised in the pages of ARTnews as “one of the most successful of the ten sculptures” exhibited on the pavilion.75 Assembled from eight figures made out of tuxedoes soaked in resin and fashioned into tortuously rigid poses and hung from a horizontal ladder, Cliffhangers presents a striking—­ and, considering its title, suspenseful—­ depiction of humanity fighting against gravity. Donald Judd, reviewing the work, described it, not entirely dismissively, as seeming “dusty, disheveled, corroded, skeletal, and generally leftover and dying.”76 Mallary himself portrayed his Cliffhangers as a “collapsed vaudeville act, a cluster of mountaineers in disarray. Harold Lloyd is hanging there by the hands of his clock.” Mallary’s choice of tuxedoes as a sculptural medium invests the figures with a 60

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Robert Mallary, Cliffhangers, 1964. Installation view outside the New York State Pavilion, 1964 New York World’s Fair.

Fig. 18.

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sense of cultural degeneration, a facet of the work recognized by one critic who acknowledged “the art-­look” of Mallary’s work, the way that no matter how junky and antiformal they may ostensibly appear, a certain traditionalism is detectable that summons classical statuary as much as baroque drapery.77 Like Newman’s Broken Obelisk, Hague’s archaeologically inflected figures, and so much of the detrital classicism of postwar sculpture, Mallary’s sculptures do not simply present a vision of objects in a state of dereliction but, more precisely, works of art in a state of dereliction. As such Cliffhangers can be seen as being in dialogue with what was undoubtedly the most famous work of art exhibited at the fair, Michelangelo’s Pietà, which visitors viewed through bulletproof Lucite while being moved on a conveyor belt and serenaded with what one critic derisively called “Gregorian Musak,” thus associating the Renaissance masterpiece in its own way with the modern tradition of the sculptural partial figure as a cipher for technological ­advancement. Not only was Cliffhangers anomalous in comparison to the other artworks adjacent to it on the New York State Pavilion, it also in many ways contrasted to the main theme of the fair itself, “Peace through Understanding,” which was materialized in various celebratory expositions of humanity’s accomplishments, perhaps most famously in the hugely popular Futurama exhibit sponsored by General Motors, where visitors could see visions of “the near future” in which people commute to the Moon and live and work in underwater colonies. Mallary described Cliffhangers’ relation to the fair’s technological Pollyannaism in notably “sentinelist” terms, calling the work “a grim reminder of total human extinction,” and “a strident warning which is probably mostly lost in the dense cacophony of the Fair as a whole—­what with all the ‘onward-­and-­upward-­with-­science-­ and-­technology’ hallelujahs and the ‘brave new world’ crowing.”78 Indeed, the work’s essential engagement with gravity presents a strident opposition to such optimism, contrasting the “onward-­and-­upward” sentiments of the fair with the descending trajectory of future projectiles and falling bodies. And yet in many ways Mallary’s grim portent of a much less bright future was discernable in other facets of the fair as well. Most of the other works of art hung on Johnson’s pavilion suggested the world of bright commodities and new frontiers, yet the presence of large sculptures by Hague and Roszak in other locations on the fairgrounds seemed more in tune with the message of Cliffhangers: Roszak showed a unambiguously rocket-­or-­missile-­shaped sculpture called Forms in Transit (fig. 19). Even more explicit in this conflation of the space age and the atomic age was Howard Delue’s Rocket Launcher, a forty-­three-­foot-­tall bronze sculpture depicting a projectile rising from the hand of a classical male nude and climbing into the stars. A similar paradox was evident in the sculptural program at the recently opened New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, a building that also bore the architectural 62

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Theodore Roszak, Forms in Transit, 1964. Aluminum and stainless steel, 12 × 14 × 30 ft. (366 × 427 × 914 cm). New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Fig. 19.

and curatorial mark of Philip Johnson and that was regarded as a supplemental expression of the “onward-­and upward” cultural moment signaled by the fair across the river. Here Reuben Nakian’s Voyage to Crete, with its title overdeterminedly emphasizing the sculpture’s visual allusions to the sort of weather-­beaten archaeological fragment summoned by Hague’s work, was shown alongside a large gray grid of numbers sculpted out of lead by Johns, and, perhaps most menacing of all, Lee Bontecou’s massive untitled wall relief work (fig. 20), which a reviewer from Life magazine reported contained the “plexiglass turret of an old World War Two bomber.”79 Installed across the plaza at the Philharmonic Hall, Seymour Lipton’s biblically and apocalyptically allusive Archangel, which the artist claimed was an assertion “that man can survive,” further intimated the grim prognostications associated with cultural achievement in the postwar era. These backward-­ looking if not apocalyptic implications of a technologically advanced future were also present in the surprisingly numerous representations of “the dawn of life on earth” at the fair. The reviewer for ARTnews noted that at the popular Ford Pavilion “pterodactyls fly and life-­sized cavemen wave” at drivers as they passed through the skyway while children could walk among brontosauruses at the Sinclair Oil The New Sense of Fate

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Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1964. Welded steel, canvas, epoxy, resin, and Plexiglas, 21 ft. 4 in. × 5 ft. 6 in. × 2 ft. (650 × 170 × 60 cm). Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., New York State Theater, a gift of Albert A. List Foundation, Inc.

Fig. 20.

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Pavilion.80 Considering such prehistoric spectacles, Mallary’s Cliffhangers could easily be perceived as cliff dwellers, a reading that finds a degree of corroboration in the group of works the artists produced in the late 1950s, such as Plaque, that were inspired by Native American petroglyphs that Mallary was able to see during his tenure teaching at the University of New Mexico. Amid all of the futurological optimism at the fair, which presented an orderly and progressive march from the dawn of mankind to an under­ water world of the future, works like Mallary’s suggested the now somewhat obvious if not ominously primordial implications of these visions of the future. (Why, for instance, had humanity in “The World of Tomorrow” moved deep beneath the waves?) One could say that sculptures like Mallary’s Cliffhangers as well as Newman’s Broken Obelisk, conceived one year earlier, were able to prophesy such grave visions of the future, a future in which the sky had become an arena of danger, because of their medium’s rela­ tion to gravity as well as its increasingly technological facets, perhaps most notably in the use of new materials like resin and Corten. Aligning the future with the downward thrust of gravity, these works saw the fate of mankind arriving from above and ending where it began.

The New Sense of Fate

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OCULUS (D. SMITH)

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CHAPTER TWO SCULPTURE AND THE WEAPON

One dimension of our plight can only be discovered in a phenomenology of the Bomb. —­s tanley

cavell ,

Must We Mean What We Say

Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception. —­paul

virilio ,

War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception

The concept of space is fundamental to the history of sculpture. A work of sculpture occupies actual space more obviously than any other artistic medium, with the exception of architecture, to which it has often been affiliated in both practice and critical reception, albeit often relegated as a decorative supplement to it. Sculpture’s material existence in real space has been considered alternately a strength and a weakness. If for certain Renaissance humanists sculpture’s physicality, its basic thingliness, relegated it below what was seen as more intellectually bound pursuits, thus setting the terms for the long-­standing paragone debate with its artistic “­other,” painting, for many modern artists the medium’s brute substantiality promised a material means of integrating art into life and, even more important perhaps, investing the work with a sense of immediacy and agency in the world beyond its physical and aesthetic limits.1 This new attentiveness of sculpture’s engagement with its surroundings, as well as the larger world of everyday objects, was heralded by the dual innovations of collage and the readymade in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In the way they emphasized the selection and assemblage of preexisting entities over creation ex n ­ ihilo, both practices recalibrated and expanded long-­held notions of artistic imagination, technique, and originality, rendering any object potentially aesthetically significant. By radically expanding what could be considered a viable artistic material, these innovations seemed to interrogate the limits of conventional media like painting, drawing, and sculpture. Within what might be seen as the conventional history of the transition from modernism to postmodernism that is understood to have taken place in the 1960s, the conceptual implications of these practices set the stage for the apotheosis of the minimalist “specific 67

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object” and the declaration of the “post-­medium condition” in which institutional and discursive perimeters rather than those of medium and material determine aesthetic criteria and identity.2 This still-­prevailing account largely privileges the self-­reflexive use of materials (paint as paint, metal as metal, and so on) and the work of art’s equally authentic occupations of real space as evidence of its aesthetic autonomy and illusion-­defying potential. Yet such approaches are ill-­equipped to recognize the figural allusiveness and larger referential capacity that a work of art may yield, whether in terms of its visual resemblance to things in the world or its visionary suggestion of things yet to be. By occluding the imaginative content of works that have been integrated into the modernist/postmodernist canon and sequestering to historical oblivion a wide array of artistic practices that do not neatly fit into its aesthetic strictures, the dominant modernist and postmodernist accounts of postwar sculpture provide a markedly narrow and misguided view of the significance of these works. In practice many artists working in the 1940s and 1950s—­and even those closely associated with the modernist paradigm, like David Smith—­sought to explore the formal and expressive possibilities of a distinctly sculptural tradition that could incorporate the innovations of collage and the readymade without wholly abandoning certain long-­standing conventions of the medium such as mass, space, and monumentality. Indeed, the way these artists’ works integrated nontraditional materials into the distinctly spatial practice of sculpture set the stage for the largely phenomenological understanding of minimalism and the rise of installation-­based approaches in contemporary art more generally. As recounted in numerous histories of modern sculpture, the cubist and subsequent constructivist innovations coupled with the use of welding transformed the medium.3 In groundbreaking works like Cactus Man (fig. 21), Julio González used the binding heat of the acetylate torch to conjoin various metal elements into rough and notably linear entities that often retained a sense of the appropriated industrial and commercial parts and fragments from which he assembled his sculptures. This radical reconsideration of sculpture as assemblage rather than the accumulation or subtraction of matter (as in modeling and carving) had considerable implications for the medium. Most significantly perhaps, the sculptural object, no longer chiseled from a stone or formed from a slab of clay, became less solid and massive; its hollowness frequently was articulated visibly through negative spaces while its unprecedented insubstantiality was performed in arrangements that often displayed a teetering equipoise that was only possible through the lighter materials and strong bonds intrinsic to the welding process. Sculpture was increasingly formed out of two-­dimensional planes and linear poles rather than solid masses, consequently appearing less imitative of flesh and more similar to machines and architecture. For instance, in Picasso’s Project for a Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire, created in 1928 and enlarged in 1962 (fig. 22) the thin, metal armature both 68

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Julio González, “Monsieur” Cactus (Cactus Man I), 1939 (cast 1953–­54). Bronze and patina, 235⁄16 × 913⁄16 × 611⁄16 in. (64.3 × 25 × 17 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976. (76.2553.136)

Pablo Picasso, Project for a Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire, 1962 (enlarged version after 1928 original maquette). Painted steel, 78 × 297⁄8 × 627⁄8 in. (198.1 × 74.8 × 159.8 cm), including base. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. (72.1979)

Fig. 21.

Fig. 22.

literally and figuratively frames and encloses space rather than displacing it as in traditional three-­dimensional art. Welded sculpture’s airy openness made its existence in actual space crucial to its visual appearance. The world, one could say, appeared within the work, just as its decidedly nonartistic materials and methods of assembly made it strikingly of the world. This facet of modern sculpture led the influential art critic Clement Greenberg to declare in 1948 that the work of a group of American sculptors such as David Smith, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton, Peter Grippe, and Theodore Roszak represented “perhaps the most important manifestation of the visual arts since cubist painting.” According to Greenberg, because the new sculpture, in its use of industrial materials for nonimitative ends, seemed to inherently emphasize its “self-­evident physical reality” and “the positive truth of free space, altogether away from the picture plane,” this body of work threatened to surpass what the critic called “painting’s place as the supreme visual art.” Moreover, argued Greenberg, the welding technique offered a more expansive expressive vocabulary than painting, which appeared to be moving increasingly Sculpture and the Weapon

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David Smith, False Peace Spectre, 1945. Painted steel and bronze, 12½ × 27¼ × 10¾ in. (31.8 × 69.2 × 27.3 cm). Private collection.

Fig. 23.

into the rarified realms of nonobjective “purity.” “Released from mass and solidity,” he wrote, “sculpture finds a much larger world before it, and itself in the position to say all that painting can no longer say.”4 Thus an artist like David Smith, whom Greenberg repeatedly singled out as the greatest sculptor of his generation, could create works such as War Spectre and False Peace Spectre (two of numerous specters and belligerent avian fantasies the artist created between 1944 and 1947) whose amalgamation of machine and beast could unambiguously, if surreally, symbolize the ravages of industrialized warfare without compromising its aesthetic integrity and autonomy (fig. 23). Smith’s sculptural lexicon of cut and forged sheets of steel coupled with industrial detritus like rusted cogs and fused chain links ensured the work’s illusion-­defying modernist credentials. It also invested them with a range of associations: functional objects like weather vanes and tools as well as more technologically advanced manufactures like automobiles and airplanes. In fact, Smith claimed that the direct metal welding techniques he used in his sculptural practice were “the same as in locomotive building” and that his studio was “a small factory with the same make and quality tools used by production factories.”5 Smith repeatedly acknowledged and celebrated the indus­trial associations of his art, noting the allusions to danger and destruction his sculptural components were capable of invoking. A material like steel, he stated, “possesses little art

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history. Its associations are primarily of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality.”6 Smith seemed to relish these industrial connotations, in particular appreciating what he saw as their apparent “vulgarity.” For Smith these lowly signs could address the paradoxical allure and even beauty of malevolent forces in the modern world in a language that was not yet tempered by conventional codes of aesthetic beauty. Sarah Hamill has aptly described the artist’s interest in vulgarity as a way to “orient his viewer to visual forms that had not been identified and explained by society, or to what lay beyond artistic traditions or mass cultural norms,” emphasizing its rejection of past m ­ ores and 7 possible implications for the future of society. This act of visual reorientation is powerfully figured in a work like False Peace Spectre, whose metallic avian symbolism alludes more to industrial design (such as automobile hood ornaments, architectural embellishment, and comic book illustrations) than conventional notions of sculpture (even the sort of cubist-­inspired works of Picasso and González). In a rather oblique poetic statement the artist acknowledged the bellicose insinuations of his aerodynamic avian forms. “The cloud-­fearing of spectres,” he wrote, “has always the note of hope, and within the vulgarity of the form an upturn of beauty.”8 Conjoining futuristic rockets with primordial beasts, Smith’s specters stressed the haunting temporality summoned in their titles. With its talons grasping writhing forms that suggest some sort of hybrid between a cannon and a stringed instrument and its beak holding what one critic described as a “wilted olive branch,” Smith’s False Peace Spectre seems to connect a subject (notably tinged with apocalyptic connotations) from the biblical past with a science-­fiction future, albeit more likely to perch on an arc of electricity than the one piloted by Noah.9 Like the sleek and garish hood ornaments that were found on the tanklike cars produced after the war by such manufacturers as Ford, Chevrolet, and Studebaker (where Smith worked as a welder), the artist’s robotic raptors expressed the astonishing beauty shared by birds of prey and mechanical forms when engineered for speed and power. The works’ allusions to such commercial, industrial, and vernacular sources, including imagery taken from photographs and illustrations found in magazines and comic books, was in fact central to their meaning, but not as modernist critics like Greenberg might have seen it, as a means of distinguishing the work of art from what was seen as the corruption of mass culture, nor to cite T. J. Clark’s ingenious reading of abstract expressionism’s vulgarity, as a resigned portent of its future fate embalmed over the mantle of some déclassé collector.10 Rather, Smith sought to draw on brutal and common forms—­what he once described as “the dump and discard of culture”—­to produce art that exhibited (or perhaps homeopathically internalized) a sense of physical and cultural power that outstripped anything found in fine art practices and thus could convincingly

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engage with the contemporary social conditions in which they were produced as well as the lived space in which they existed.11 The materially direct, visibly dynamic, and oftentimes minatory character of Smith’s art in many ways set the tone for what was often described as “the new sculpture” that emerged as a major artistic force in the United States in the mid-­1940s. Smith’s frank incorporation of industrial materials and methods in his sculptural practice is typically understood as the central facet of his art historical significance, establishing his place within a modernist genealogy going back to cubism and pointing forward to minimalism. Much less studied is his leading role within a group of contemporaneous, “new” sculptors such as Ferber, Grippe, and Roszak who worked in an unabashedly expressive manner and like Smith exhibited a certain vulgarity that to many critics made their works appear much more overtly engaged with the world than most modernist (“pure,” abstract) painting of the period. While certain scholars have considered the broader social significance of Smith’s iconography, especially his vehemently antiwar Medals of Dishonor (1937–­40) and the prevalence of cannons in his personal imagery, it could be argued that scholarship surrounding his art—­and postwar American sculpture more generally—­has not fully contended with its essential vulgarity, which is to say its expressive content and engagement with broader social contexts or, to argue more forcefully, the ways in which the specific content of mechanized—­and often militarized—­violence demanded the formal attributes that have served as the primary point of analysis for this body of work.12 In fact one might venture that the dictates of modernist—­and for that matter contemporary—­aesthetics have left crucial facets of postwar American sculpture’s significance largely unaccounted for, thus marginalizing the work of almost every artist working in three dimensions with the notable exception of Smith. (Smith’s work, which is often seen as the paradigmatic instance of modernist sculpture equal to the achievement of abstract expressionist painters like Pollock and de Kooning, represents the sole exception to this contemporary oblivion to the broader sculptural practice in postwar United States and the significant acclaim it achieved in the 1940s and ’50s.)13 Admittedly, many of the other sculptors of his generation such as Ferber, Roszak, and Lassaw (whose work will be the considered alongside Smith’s throughout this chapter) exhibited a high-­keyed expressivity that sometimes bordered on melodrama that has subsequently marked them as aesthetically frozen cultural artifacts of a certain strand of American Cold War culture, one arguably epitomized by the typically wide-­eyed and flatfooted science fiction of the period. Any discussion of this body of work must acknowledge what one critic has rightly described as their “unintended funniness,” the way their oftentimes ponderous titles and morbidly anthropomorphic forms seem as outdated and corny to our contemporary sensibilities as Robbie the Robot from the 1956 sci-­fi film Forbidden Planet.14 These ostensibly dated characteristics might invalidate their viability as 72

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timeless works of modern art, or even art that can continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. But considering the fact that they were created within a cultural milieu in which any sense of timelessness was threatened by the apocalyptic power of the atomic bomb, it could be argued that their current sense of datedness was in fact integral to their fatalistic vision of the future, pointing to a message of inexorable obsolescence in the face of what appeared to be a radical expansion of humankind’s technological reach. Indeed, one might even venture to propose that their current fate, largely forgotten and stowed away in the storage facilities of museums, can be understood not simply as a result of their inability to fit within canonical modernist narratives but as paradoxically integral to their rhetoric of futuristic dread and the possibility of historical oblivion that seemed to threaten all aspects of human civilization in the years following the appearance of the atomic bomb. More certainly the invocations of violence and technology summoned by the sculptures of artists like Roszak, Ferber—­and Smith for that matter—­ally them in quite visible ways with the broader discourse of postwar science fiction.15 As Fredric Jameson has argued, this alternate, albeit quite popular, strand of Cold War culture cannot be effectively evaluated or understood with the same criteria applied to examples of high modernism, but in many ways because of this difference has the capacity to “express realities and dimensions that escape” these more rarified realms of artistic production.16 Like the best science-­fiction films and literature of the period such as Them! (1956) and novels like Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time Slip (1964), these works will always seem stylistically awkward and even campy in relation to the established modernist canon.17 Which is not say that they do not have formal complexity or conceptual intelligence, only that the evaluative criteria needed to appreciate their aesthetic significance have yet to be fully articulated (or perhaps have been lost to oblivion). Indeed one could argue that they posit an alternative genealogy of sculpture, one that aligns it at once with popular genres and more functional everyday objects and thus challenges established ­aesthetic paradigms.

SCULPTURE AS WEAPON The new sculptural lexicon facilitated by the direct metal welding technique not only ­enabled a remarkable degree of allusive expressivity, spatial expansiveness, and symbolic directness (not to mention formal abstraction), but it also redirected the tradition of modern sculpture away from a classical paradigm predicated on the human figure and toward more functional instances of three-­dimensional production such as tools, weapons, and architecture. Replacing the medium’s theological origin story of the divine modeling of humanity from clay with a markedly profane, or as Smith would put it, “vulgar,” Sculpture and the Weapon

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genealogy based on human artifacts and technological inventions, the new sculpture seemed to disavow, or in the case of Smith’s series of Tanktotems slyly confound, sculpture’s long-­standing figural and totemistic associations as well as its classical, humanist pedigree. Smith’s understanding of the unconventional and decidedly functional basis of the new sculpture relied on a certain strand of modernist primitivism expressed in Picasso’s description of the African masks and “fetishes” that crucially informed the development of cubism as “weapons” as well as Dada and constructivist investigations of nonart materials and purposes.18 This alternate genealogy of modern sculpture was charted around the same moment when Smith was developing his sculptural lexicon in a short essay by the artist John Stephan titled “Sculpture and the Weapon,” which appeared in the June 1948 issue of the Tiger’s Eye (which Stephan cofounded and where Barnett Newman’s essay concerning “The New Sense of Fate” appeared three months earlier). In it the ­author lays out a condensed history of “man’s departure from the wilderness of the animal toward civilization” in which the discovery of “an inanimate object as a weapon” plays a decisive role in human civilization, transforming the act of killing from an “incidental” act to an “art, with tragic consequences.” In other words, the sculptural weapon enabled the premeditated planning of murder, mobilizing a temporal and thus tragic perspective to death and leading to the strategic militarization of killing so that war itself might be understood as an art. Drawing on a tradition of criticism such as Baudelaire’s “Why Sculpture Is Boring” (1846) that positioned sculpture as the primordial foil to the more intellectual pursuit of painting, Stephan reconsiders the totemistic origins of the medium, stating that weapons would have been “worshipped in their abstract shapes before images resembling man or animals were fashioned.” For Stephan the modern, abstract, and sometimes minatory new sculpture, which drew on this tradition of “sculpture and the weapon,” could combat the excessively rationalized modern world by unsettling the “nostalgic lives” of people lost in what he called a “flood of rationalizing light” within the “mechanical wilderness,” one in which Stephan notes “our atomic scientists . . . might prove that we are not what we are.”19 Isamu Noguchi, in his contribution to the collection of fourteen short statements by sculptors in the same issue, reiterated Stephan’s assertion, and made its associations with modern warfare explicit, writing that “if the first weapon had no meaning until fashioned by sculpture, neither has the atom.”20 Pairing the medium’s declaration of base materiality with its industrial affinities, Noguchi’s statement suggests the privileged position of sculpture to comment on the paradoxical capacity of modern technology to summon primordial forces and reveal their innermost meanings. Moreover, it reveals how for certain sculptors, weaponry provided a potent model for a three-­dimensional art that would be newly relevant in a postwar world.

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While the welding technique, according to the art historian Robert Goldwater, freed the artist “of the expense and cumbersome materials of the traditional methods, with their dependence on expert assistance,” thus granting the sculptor a similar sense of individual freedom that was exemplified by the mythic lone action painter at work in his studio, it also associated their practice with some of the most powerful industrial—­ and distinctly militaristic—­forces operating at the time.21 Many of the leading sculptors working in the United States in the years following World War II who used the welding torch as their primary artistic instrument developed their technical skills while contributing to the war effort in one way or another. Smith, although past the age limit for war duty (he was thirty-­seven when the war started) and “rejected” by the army, as he noted in a brief biographic sketch, because of his “sinus trouble,” nonetheless was “rated by army ordinance as a 1st class armor plate welder” of tank frames during the war.22 Similarly, Ibram Lassaw learned to weld during his stint in the army; Theodore Roszak, already an accomplished artist during the 1930s, spent most of the years during the war working at the Brewster Aircraft Corporation and teaching aircraft mechanics at Stevens Institute of Technology; and Richard Stankiewicz served in the navy from 1941 to 1947 and worked at the Advanced Tool and Die Company in Detroit making, among other things, “fixtures for tanks.”23 For these artists the welding torch served as a powerful means to simultaneously figure the violence that was increasingly associated with industrial technology in the postwar years—­especially the relationship between welded metal and airplanes—­and, through the liquid and primitivist forms produced by the molten metal, counteract what was often seen as the dehumanizing repetitiveness of modern society. Because many of the processes and materials used by artists exploring welding techniques maintained a direct connection to actual objects in the world, their works sometimes exhibited a symbolic capacity that exceeded simple iconography or the sort of mimetic realism often attributed to conventional sculptural materials like marble. For instance, Smith stated that steel contained a range of associations, some “beautiful, because of all the movement associated with it, its strength and functions,” but also some “brutal,” summoning “the rapist, the murderer and death-­dealing giants.”24 Unlike the Dada readymade (which could be seen as the industrial “other” to the cubist welded sculpture), the new sculpture did not suggest the commercial commodity so much as the industrial machine. While Jacob Epstein’s frightening Rock Drill (fig. 24) serves as a visionary origin of this tradition (the work was destroyed in 1916 soon after its public exhibition and thus not seen by many artists until its reconstruction in 1974), Jean Tinguely’s series of auto-­creative Meta-­matics (Rube Goldberg–­like contraptions whose herky-­jerky kinetics produces abstract drawings and paintings) and similarly gimcrack self-­destructing sculptures such as his notorious Homage to New York, which performed Sculpture and the Weapon

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Jacob Epstein, Rock Drill, 1913 (remodeled in 1973 by Kenneth Cook and Ann Christopher). Polyester resin, metal, and wood, 8011⁄16 × 5511⁄16 × 5511⁄16 in. (205 × 141.5 × 141.5 cm). Birmingham Museums Trust, United Kingdom.

Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969. Cor-­Ten steel and aluminum, coated with resin and painted with polyurethane enamel, 23 ft. 6 in. × 24 ft. 10½ in. × 10 ft. 11 in. (716 × 758 × 333 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Gift of Colossal Keepsake Corporation.

Fig. 24.

Fig. 25.

its own demolition in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art on March 17, 1960, materialized such mechanic hybridity as public spectacle. The damage and willed disorder staged by Tinguely’s sculptures clearly established a common theme in postwar sculpture—­namely, the irrational, animistic, and frequently violent underpinnings associated with modern industrialized society. The surreal conjunction of mechanic and animistic motifs aligned this strand of postwar sculpture with some of the most advanced science fiction of the period, which similarly explored the uncanny nexus of advanced technology and biological mutation. These motifs arguably found their ultimate manifestation in the first half of the 1960s with Robert Smithson’s assemblages featuring colorful electronic components attached to tinted pornographic photographs; Paul Thek’s self-­styled technological reliquaries of illusionistic wax rendi76

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Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961, 1961. Welded steel, canvas, wire, and rope, 72½ × 66 × 24¾ in. (184.2 × 167.6 × 62.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase. (61.41)

Fig. 26.

tions of flesh contained in Plexiglas boxes and often attached to wires; Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Breathing Machines featuring wax effigies of female faces with audiocassette players; and Claes Oldenburg’s pop renditions of preposterously anthropomorphized mechanical commodities such as typewriters, fans, and telephones that were sometimes enlarged to monumental proportions so that they dwarfed their human beholders.25 These artists’ surreal and often sexualized conjunctions of bodies and machines frequently fell back on the tradition of sculpture and weaponry. Works like Thek’s Warrior’s Arm (1967, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), a highly illusionistic wax rendering of a Roman soldier’s leather-­clad appendage, and Oldenburg’s collection of found object “Ray Guns” assembled in his Mouse Museum (1969–­77) as well as the monumentally mechanic phallus, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (fig. 25), which the artist created as an antiwar antimonument and which he described as a “sort of soft and motorized Barney Newman Obelisk,” accentuated the outlandish anthropomorphism of armaments, oftentimes in a surreally comic manner that subdued their sense of menace.26 These absurdist and primitivist associations between weaponry and humanity were materialized even more unambiguously and far less humorously in Lee Bontecou’s work from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The complex multipart wall reliefs that the Sculpture and the Weapon

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artist created beginning around 1960 represent the most fully wrought consideration of the particularly menacing character of modern mechanical man, suggesting a cyborgian complicity between machines like turbines and jet engines and elementary biological forms (fig. 26).27 The works’ characteristic palette of dun white, olive green, and what one critic writing in 1961 called “totalitarian grey,” punctuated with the warm browns and cool blacks of rusted metal and soot, summon the camouflage of army fatigues, albeit mutated into something at once more futuristic and primordial.28 The grommet holes, double seams, stenciled characters, and heavy-­duty zippers that punctuate and perforate the thick, discolored fabric constituting the principal surface of the works heighten these associations of field gear. The configurations of circular saw blades and metal grilles and meshes that began to appear in her works around 1960 invoke mechanical power at its most foreboding. (Bontecou in fact used a great deal of fabric from military surplus backpacks and tents.)29 Stains and scratches on both the cloth and metal components of the works summon past usage, while the prickly wires that suture the fabric to the metal armature bestow an actual physical danger to viewers who approach the objects too closely. These visual and material signs of violence, coupled with their actual projection into the space of the viewer, gave Bontecou’s works from this period a tangible sense of looming danger that prompted words like “menacing” and “threatening” by critics, while their skeletal, conical armatures invited organic if not specifically anthropomorphic—­ and often gendered—­associations (the vagina dentata was an unsurprisingly common citation).30 The artist repeatedly emphasized the essential ambiguity of her work, yet in a statement from 1960 she expressed a more specific subject that her sculpture addressed, writing that among her concerns was “to glimpse some of the fear, hope, ugliness, beauty and mystery that exists in us all and which hangs over all the young people today” and to “build things that express our relation to this country” as well as “to other countries” and “other worlds.”31 Bontecou’s statement suggests the possible political content of her work, in its capacity to reflect the material conditions in which it was produced and more importantly in the way that it might prompt responses in viewers—­and particular young viewers, those with the greatest stake in the future—­to consider their place in the world at large. Emerging off the wall in a vaguely symmetrical and tapering outcropping that typically terminates in a black hole that appears to recede into an abysmal void, these works evoked the ominous, and noticeably timeworn, forces that seemed to “hang over” the youth of the period, literally protruding into their surroundings with a real sense of danger and drama. Bontecou’s aggressive reliefs of the early 1960s, like Oldenburg’s cartoonish guns and tanks that nearly bookend the decade, can be regarded as culminating expressions of a tendency that the previous generation of sculptors working in welded metal had 78

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Richard Hunt, Extending Horizontal Form, 1958. Steel, 2315⁄16 × 56½ × 113⁄8 in. (60.8 × 143.5 × 28.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art. (58.53) Fig. 27.

already explored, albeit in a less figuratively explicit manner through the use of industrial materials and methods. Indeed, it could be argued that incorporation of military surplus into Bontecou’s works represents a modern manifestation of a tradition of incorporating actual weapons into sculpture that reaches back to antiquity, as in the Doryphoros or Spearbearer, in which an actual weapon is placed into the hands of a figural statue, or through the tradition of spoliation in which used armaments were amalgamated into architectural structures or presented as independent ornaments or monuments. The display of swords or rifles above a mantlepiece or the placement of cannons and pyramids of cannonballs next to civic buildings and along public promenades represents instances of an alternate tradition of using military items as architectural adornment that continued into modernity.32 For many of the sculptors working in welded metal in the 1940s and ’50s, the associations between sculpture and the weapon were presented through abstract adaptations of swords, bows, guns, and shields, aligning their artistic endeavors with the metallurgy of blacksmiths and armorers as well as the long tradition of melting metal sculpture to produce weapons suggesting the shared material basis of these two realms of production. (Remarkably, both Ferber and Lipton practiced the semimetallurgic art of dentistry before becoming professional artists.) In works like Richard Hunt’s rifle-­like Extending Horizontal Form from 1958 (fig. 27), Smith’s Four Soldiers (fig. 28) Sculpture and the Weapon

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David Smith, Four Soldiers, 1950–­51. Steel and stainless steel, 25 × 58¼ × 12¾ in. (63.5 × 148 × 32.4 cm). Private collection.

Isamu Noguchi, War (Helmet) (Kabuto), 1952. Shigaraki stoneware, 281⁄8 × 13 × 123⁄8 in. (71.4 × 33 × 31.4 cm). Sogetsu Art Museum, Tokyo.

Fig. 28.

Fig. 29.

carrying abstracted rifles, and Noguchi’s helmet-­shaped Daruma and War (fig. 29) from 1952, these sculptors explored their chosen materials’ long relationship to the fabrication of weapons and armor. Such allusions can also be discerned in the already mentioned sight-­like aperture of Lipton’s Sentinel (see fig. 12) and Roszak’s missile-­shaped Forms in Transit (see fig. 19). Lane Faison described Ferber’s Heraldic (fig. 30) as “a sort of battle-­axe affixed to a long and tapering pedestal.” Yet the work’s overall crescent shape bisected by a pointed horizontal rod invites even more overt allusions to a bow and arrow, a subject the artist addressed directly, if in many way more abstractly, in The Bow from 1950.33 In fact, a small, prefabricated disc that connects the welded components of the sculpture to its wooden base allows the work to rotate, suggesting a sort of mounted weapon that could aim at targets across a wide field of vision. This relationship between viewing sculpture and the act of taking aim, as one would with a bow or rifle, is crucial to Smith’s Oculus (fig. 31), which the artist noted in a l­ etter to his dealer “takes place at eye level.”34 When viewed from its planar side (the side that is typically represented in illustrations of the work and the view that Smith himself documented when he photographed it), the sculpture appears like a series of rebus-­like glyphs in which the two ovoid forms, one flat the other teardrop-­shaped, summon the 80

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Herbert Ferber, Heraldic, 1957. Brass mounted on painted wood, brass base, 389⁄16 × 133⁄16 × 185⁄16 in. (98 × 33.5 × 46.5 cm). Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Bequest of Lawrence H. Bloedel, Class of 1923. (77.9.133)

Fig. 30.

title’s allusion to the circular opening at the top of domes. Yet when viewed from what Smith would call its “end view,” Oculus appears to be some sort of scope-­like device from which one can view or imaginatively “take aim,” an act, that as Paul Virilio persuasively argued, was already coded in the rifle-­like site of the camera itself, which can be seen as “a way of technically aligning oracular perception along an imaginary axis.”35 This function is most evident in the two forms at either end of the sculpture where metal shapes create spaces that are bisected by thin wires, producing a cross-­hair-­like effect within the encircled view. While Smith’s penchant for what Edward Fry described as “space Sculpture and the Weapon

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David Smith, Oculus, 1947. Painted steel on wood base, 321⁄8 × 37 × 75⁄8 in. (81.6 × 94 × 19.4 cm). Private collection.

Fig. 31.

framing devices” in his works from the 1950s suggests this almost picturesque ­aspect of his sculpture (evident most clearly perhaps in his photographs of the sculptures in the fields outside of his studio), the work’s industrial connotations associate these vision-­framing passages with targeting weaponry, turning many of the negative spaces produced by his linear forms into a primitive sort of “vision machine,” to use the Virilio’s terminology for devices used to aim perception, as in a camera or a gun.36 Like Smith’s Oculus, Ferber’s Game No. 2 from 1950 (fig. 32) plays on the tension between a complex and patently symbolic planar view that encourages a free-­ranging generalized mode of perception associated with aesthetic reflection and a constricted, end view that is marked by an oculus-­like hole that promotes a monocular mode of perception characteristic of optical technologies like camera viewfinders and weapon scopes. This notably star-­shaped component—­the sun serving as a prominent motif in the artist’s oeuvre from the 1950s—­with its thin metal wires projecting from its edge, invites viewers to look through it, framing a view of the intertwined trajectories of parabolically curving metal rods. (These can be set in a multitude of combinations within a matrix of gridded holes on the sculpture’s base, thus perhaps insinuating the “game” in the work’s title.) Seen from its planar side, in the work’s current configuration, a series 82

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Herbert Ferber, Game No. 2, 1950. Lead, copper, and brass, 28¾ × 19½ × 18½ in. (73 × 49.5 × 47 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift of Mrs. Samuel I. Roseman, 1964. (64.1711)

Fig. 32.

of triangular forms with fin-­or wing-­like appendages appear to rise and dive, investing the curving armature of metal wires with the contour of a projectile’s trajectory. Rather than simulating a primitive weapon like an ax or bow, the principle motifs of Game No. 2 seem to summon the most sophisticated and destructive weaponry devised by humanity: missiles and jet airplanes, and, as in Oculus, one can imagine the diagonal lines that punctuate the circular oculus as crosshairs through which a gunner, whether on land or in the air, might track the movements of an enemy plane. The artist Henry Billings represented such a mode of vision in a series of paintings that depict, according to a 1945 article in Life magazine in which they were illustrated, “strafing targets as they appear to the fighter pilot through the transparent rectangle of his reflector gunsight.”37 With their spermatozoid-­like tracers homing in on the encircled targets, Billings’s images Sculpture and the Weapon

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Page from Life magazine featuring Henry Billings painting. From “Ground Strafing,” Life, July 30, 1945, 54.

Fig. 33.

suggest a material referent for the linear—­and notably primordial—­glyphs viewed through Smith’s geometric site (fig. 33). These associations between military aviation and a directed, “scopic” mode of vision (as well as any possible erotic and gendered connotations of warfare) pervaded the work of Bontecou, not only in terms of the works’ funneling forms that suggest the nose of a jet or its engine but also in the various ways in which her sculptural compositions imply functional rather than aesthetic practices. In an untitled work from 1962 (the artist chose not to name her works, although she occasionally referred to pieces like this as part of her “prison” series because of the striated bands of color and metal grates that dominate its imagery), the various apertures that pierce the surface of the work, from the dark abysses at the center of the wall relief to the numerous smaller slots and holes that dot their surfaces, invite viewers to peer into the specific facets of the work. 84

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Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1959. Welded steel and plastic, 9 × 27 × 7 in. (22.9 × 68.6 × 17.8 cm). Private collection.

Fig. 34.

In an essay on the artist from 1972, Carter Ratcliff described this unconventional if not unprecedented model of sculptural and aesthetic vision as inviting a “singular point of view” in which a viewer looks into the work as much as at it.38 The work’s multiple ocular apertures, which in certain ways prefigure the peepholes that at once mark the facade of and provide the only possible view into Marcel Duchamp’s ultimate work Étant Donnés (completed 1966) as well as Nancy Holt’s series of Locators from the early 1970s, engage with a larger tendency in the new sculpture of the 1950s to frame space and produce views through openings and negative spaces and the open compositions generated by the welding technique. For instance, Michael Kirby saw Larry Bell’s pristine glass boxes as an instance of “sculpture as a visual instrument” in the way that viewers are able to look at the surrounding space through the work.39 On a somewhat different register, in Bontecou’s wall reliefs viewers are invited to direct their gaze into an abyss, so that the effect is more akin to looking into the barrel of a gun or cannon (or the interior of a jet engine) than that of peering through an opening to focus vision or “take aim.” As Elizabeth Smith notes, these scopic modes of perception were clearly developed in a series of works the artist created in 1959, precisely at the moment when her work began to assume its most f­erocious semblance, in which Bontecou produced a series of boxy sculptures whose large circular oculi makes them appear like large-­format cameras as well as in an untitled work that is basically a moderately abstracted cannon mounted on wheels (fig. 34), resembling the weapons that Smith repeatedly drew in his notebooks and appear in his Medal of Dishonor series.40 The directed sightlines invited by works like Bontecou’s Untitled, Ferber’s Game No. 2, and Smith’s Oculus certainly operated within the much more general awareness these sculptors had of the multiperspectival qualities of three-­dimensional work and, in the case of Smith in particular, the ways that the fundamental linearity and planarity Sculpture and the Weapon

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of his chosen sculptural lexicon could effectively frame certain facets of the work as well as its surroundings. Yet the various associations to weaponry, whether material or morphological, invest these formal strategies—­as well as the phenomenological implications for the beholder—­with significance that far exceeds traditional modernist concerns about planarity or postmodernist phenomenological claims. Rather, such works invited an instrumentalized, if imaginary and aestheticized, engagement in which the work of art portrayed some of the destructive violence summoned by its materials and methods. In his 1964 survey of modern sculpture, the British art historian Herbert Read criticized the new sculpture for what he saw as its “horripilate shapes,” which “accost the spectator with aggressive spikes,” going so far as to question, “to what extent does the art remain in any traditional (or semantic) sense sculpture?” Read suspected that the new sculpture, which seemed to him nothing more than “scribbles in the air,” disavowed the medium’s traditional identity “as an art of solid forms, of mass,” whose “virtues were related to spatial occupancy.”41 In many ways Read was correct. Forgoing the statue for the warhead, the new sculpture charted out a new frontier of three-­dimensional art that was based on the equally ancient genealogy of weaponry and machinery more generally, realms of three-­dimensional design that the fine arts had typically ignored or depreciated but appeared increasingly relevant to the material conditions of modern life in the second half of the twentieth century.

APOTROPAIC ANIMISM As numerous scholars of modern sculpture have noted, the medium’s emphatic material occupation of real space has invested even the most abstract examples of three-­ dimensional work with corporeal connotations (and correspondingly emphasized the bodily engagement of the viewer).42 When rendered in the new sculptural technique of welded metal these bodily allusions often registered a futuristic if not science-­fictional semblance. For instance, one critic found Smith’s “aggressive, talon-­like monumental abstractions” suggesting “the vague outline of a human being,” which she would go on to describe as “immensely, mysteriously, menacingly expressive in a Man-­from-­Mars kind of way,” while others portrayed the work of Roszak and Lipton as containing aspects that suggested “exploding star forms” and an “embryo-­Utopian vision-­transfiguration.”43 Extraterrestrial allusions can be discerned in the spindly rods that support Smith’s Tanktotems, which appear like limbs of some insectoid machine, especially when the artist arranged a group of them for his camera (fig. 35), and even more overtly in the techno-­ biomorphic fantasies that Richard Hunt showed at the Charles Alan Gallery in 1958, which one reviewer described as “intricate imaginative monuments to the survivors of the future” that revealed “overtones of Surrealism, terror and science fiction.”44 86

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David Smith, Tanktotem III, 1953. Steel, 84½ × 27 × 20 in. (214.6 × 68.6 × 50.8 cm). Private collection.

Fig. 35.

Seymour Lipton, Earth Forge II, 1955. Nickel silver over steel, 311⁄8 × 525⁄8 × 19¼ in. (79.1 × 133.7 × 48.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund. (56.188) Fig. 36.

Other sculptors would further investigate this organic-­industrial nexus by foregrounding the metamorphic and alchemical effects of the welding process itself. Many artists and critics noted how the drips and pools of molten metal appeared to re-­create primeval organic processes, so that as Roszak put it, they “take on a kind of shape and form right under your eyes that is almost like the cauldron that must be inside the earth itself.”45 Such inner-­terrestrial fantasies are central to Lipton’s Earth Forge (fig. 36), a work the artist showed at the 1958 Venice Biennale. Lipton’s characteristic technique of covering the surfaces of his works with interlayered splotches of Model metal alloy (which one writer noted was “unrustable”) suggested primordial pools from which his organic and often crustaceous forms might emerge.46 With its title evoking a powerful tool that is able to burrow into the ground and its overriding corkscrew motif, recalling the spirals of shells and imparting a turbine-­like dynamism, the work suggests less an antiquated farm implement than its possible existence in the sort of future subterranean civilization imagined in books like Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959) and Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth (1964) in which the majority of society has moved underground to avoid the dangerous fallout following a nuclear war, forcing a return to premodern and even primeval customs. Sculpture and the Weapon

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Richard Stankiewicz, The Golden Bird Is Often Sad, 1957. Iron and steel, 56½ × 42 × 23 in. (143.5 × 106.7 × 58.4 cm). David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. Gift of Charles and Kathleen Harper in honor of David Owsley Museum: Ball Brothers Foundation Gallery/AR315: Bay 5.

Fig. 37.

Numerous sculptors, many whose names are now largely forgotten but whose works enjoyed a great deal of public acclaim in the years prior to the emergence of minimalism, explored the expressive possibilities of mechanic-­organic fusion with varying degrees of innovation and cliché. Some produced works of striking uncanniness, such as Julius Schmidt, who covered the surfaces of his sculptures with cast component-­ studded forms that suggested some sort of cyborg apparatus, or Jean Follet, an artist who assembled such distinctly mechanical objects as light switches, coils, and wires into miniaturized yet monstrous figures such as her Many Headed Creature (which was included in the Art of the Assemblage exhibition at MoMA in 1961 and subsequently purchased by the museum). Others worked closer to popular visions of the technological fate of ­humankind, constructing robotic figures and mechanical abstractions whose welded forms, which often incorporated used industrial materials, seemed to suggest a world at once futuristic and derelict. 88

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Richard Stankiewicz, arguably the most characteristic sculptor of the 1950s welded metal boom, thrived at inventing such “Machine People” (to borrow the title of one of his works from 1958), typically investing his strange creations with a comic lightness that tempered the more daunting connotations of their sharp, rough, and often angular components. The Golden Bird Is Often Sad (fig. 37), with its rusty, nearly four-­foot-­long cylindrical form supported by thin, angled rods, appears at once whimsical and threatening. One critic, writing in Time magazine, compared it to a “sawed-­off bazooka.”47 Many of the artist’s works from the 1950s expressed a haunting and disquietly anthropomorphic violence that could be exposed through clever juxtaposition and the reorientation of a primary axis, revealing an unconscious and possibly phallocentric violence residing in such industrial components as screws, nuts, pipes, and rods. In works like Soldier (1955) and Warrior (1956), Stankiewicz seems to relish transforming such signs of military might into comical caricatures, emphasizing the rickety outdatedness of their machine components and rendering them humorous, nonthreatening, and sometimes ­uncannily domestic. Like the “space age” appliances that began to enter US households in the 1950s with their push-­ button controls and streamlined metal surfaces, these sculptures brought the powerful forces of modern technology into the safer spheres of art and home life.48 Understood as part of what the architect Buckminster Fuller, who pioneered the use of metal in domestic housing in his Dymaxion House (first conceived in 1930 and redesigned in 1945) called the practice of transforming “weaponry into livingry,” these works expressed the time-­honored desire of turning swords into plowshares, a theme that would be literalized in Yevgeny Vuchetich’s statue, Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares, created for the United Nations campus in 1957 depicting a classically heroic figure bending his weapon into a swooping crescent shape.49 Smith channeled this tradition in his Agricola series (1950–­57) in which the artist used farm tools and machinery to produce sculptures whose rounded forms notably diverged from the more severe forms of the artist’s Specters and Sentinels and which appeared to one critic as “ploughshares beaten into significant form.”50 Fuller made his own contribution to this paradigm in his Wichita House from 1946, a prefabricated dwelling designed as affordable housing for returning GIs made from aluminum, steel, and Plexiglas (and produced at the Beech Aircraft Plant in Wichita, Kansas) as well as his later famous design for a geodesic dome, which he claimed in 1952 could be assembled from “a triangular network of aircraft tubing, laced together internally by aircraft cable.”51 This perilous conjunction of man and machine informed Smith’s series of ten Tanktotems (1952–­60).52 In this body of work Smith conjoined the two traditions of figural totem and abstract machine, integrating these unconventional points of reference into sculptural entities that seemed to alternate between the statuesque and the Sculpture and the Weapon

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mechanical. The works’ looming presence and sharp extremities invested them with a sense of danger and power that was reinforced in their titles, which alluded as much to the boiler tanks used in their construction as it did to military vehicles. In an article that appeared in ARTnews in 1957 at the time of Smith’s retrospective at MoMA, Fairfield Porter described how the oftentimes “sharp-­edged and non-­resistant” forms of Smith’s industrial source material such as screws, hooks, gears, and chains made the sculpture not only seem “threatening” but was also literally dangerous. “You could hurt yourself on it,” Porter warned.53 A similar capacity for actual harm was evident in the numerous clawlike protuberances and metal rods bent to sharp angles that constituted the primary sculptural lexicon of Roszak’s welded sculpture. Although his work typically did not appropriate prefabricated industrial materials like Smith’s, Roszak would similarly see his practice in terms of internalizing the vulgar and formidable forces of modern industry, creating sculptures like Spectre of Kitty Hawk (see fig. 15) that exude a literal sense of menacing danger, leading one critic, for instance, to compare another work titled Scavenger (1946–­ 47) to a torpedo and another to liken the artist’s sculptures to “ancient instruments of torture.”54 Unlike Smith’s more direct appropriation of industrial forms, Roszak’s figured a markedly militarized organic-­technological amalgamation through surreal conjunctions of mechanic and biological forms. Drawing on the ornitholomorphic terminology of aircraft parts (the vessel’s nose, wings, and tail, for instance) Roszak’s Spectre of Kitty Hawk presents a fighter plane transformed—­or perhaps devolved—­into what the artist described as a “pterodactyl, an early denizen of the air, both savage and destructive.” Imagining “the re-­incarnation of the pterodactyl at Kitty Hawk,” the work, with its rough, pitted surface, appears more fossil than flesh, making it unclear if it is from some prehistoric past or postapocalyptic future.55 From certain angles the sculpture appears as a bird of prey, from others like a cosmic sphere shooting out energetic bolts, the crescent formed out of the beast’s large, polyped tail intimating a lunar destination as well as aircraft’s trajectory, or perhaps more menacingly, that of rockets and missiles.56 These elliptical arcs were a crucial formal component in Roszak’s sculptural lexicon, a sign of energy made visible. The crescent form was equally important in the early work of Alberto Giacometti who, like Roszak, showed his work at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and whose early surrealistic pieces certainly served as an important influence for a number of American sculptors. Summoning the flight of projectiles, the orbits of planets, and reverberating wavelengths expanding into space (as well as signifying, more conventionally, rounded volumetric shapes), these crescent forms epitomize the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of growth, dynamism, and expansiveness. Unlike Alexander Calder, who also made use of cosmic motifs and the parabolic trajectories of bodies in orbit, Roszak brought a dark and pessimistic vision that lacked Calder’s play90

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Theodore Roszak, Study for Spectre of Kitty Hawk, 1946. Ink on paper, 10¾ × 14 in. (27.5 × 35.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Terese and Alvin S. Lane Foundation, Inc. (111.1962)

Fig. 38.

ful dynamism and bold colors. In a group of preparatory sketches for Roszak’s work, numerous dashed lines emanate from the edges of the figure, invoking the cartoon convention of sudden movement (fig. 38), picturing a fighter plane transformed into some techno-­biological hybrid. While the surrounding space appears empty and lifeless, the figure itself appears full of vibrant energy, imagining the sort of spatial dynamism and expansiveness that the artist hoped to express in the static sculptures he created. Begun one year after the war’s end and thus exactly contemporaneous with Smith’s earliest avianesque specters, Roszak’s sculpture marked a radical stylistic transformation that was debuted at the Fourteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1946. While Spectre was not among the sculptures included in that show, the museum acquired the work in 1950, where it took up residence for some time in the office of director Alfred J. Barr, who selected it for an article published in the New York Times Magazine in 1957 as a work of contemporary sculpture that he believed would endure into the future.57 Unlike the artist’s previous constructivist works whose elegant and sleekly geometric compositions seemed to convey an optimism about technological progress, the sculptures Roszak began exhibiting in 1946, with their “gnarled and knotted” forms and “scorched and coarsely pitted” surfaces, expressed a certain unease concerning technology following the ravages of the war. Here, the central material of Sculpture and the Weapon

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modern warfare (if not modern civilization) is metamorphically returned to its molten, primordial state to forge a surreal divination of the devolution of technological man. For Roszak, as for many artists of his generation, the mythic and primordial sources of his work had the potential to invest modern art with a sort of primitive totemistic agency. In an interview in 1963 Roszak described his “impulse” to explore the welding method as a distinctly homeopathic means of transcending the destruction waged by war: It was through industry and technology that you would find the demon that was doing the destruction, and that’s where all of the instruments of modern technology would enter into play, and the easiest one was, of course, the welding method because it indicated two things—­welding means to put things together and then, of course, cutting means to destroy them, and this instrument had these two properties. It breaks down and builds up.58 Conjoining the primeval organic with the futuristic technological, Roszak’s sculpture epitomized a double dynamic of destruction and renewal that was pervasive within the sculptural practice and broader science-­fiction imagery of the postwar years in which the threat of the annihilation of the world stimulated future-­oriented thinking. In his 1955 literary manifesto “Pessimism in Science Fiction,” Philip K. Dick declares that in a world where “the loss of faith in the idea of progress, in a ‘brighter tomorrow,’ extends over our whole cultural milieu,” authors should “take the doom” of this condition “for granted. Make the ruined world of ash a premise.”59 The countless narratives of the revival of ­society following a nuclear war that were offered to the public in the 1950s and early 1960s suggests that Dick’s call was heeded by numerous other authors and screenwriters, as well as by many sculptors. One could say that the dynamics of growth, as often materialized in the imagery of artists like Roszak, were constitutive of the postwar imagination of a ruinous earth following nuclear war. Roszak, like so many of the sculptors who employed the characteristic modern method of welding, drew on a decidedly organic formal lexicon that proposed a shocking vision of technologically infused life where figures seemed machinelike and machines dynamically animate. For many of the artists who explored the expressive and formal possibilities of welding, as well as for their critics, the duality between primordial organic energies and futuristic technology invested the works with an affective power that exceeded conventional aesthetic categories of beauty and even ugliness or vulgarity. By incorporating cast-­off industrial materials into daunting, animistic forms, as in Smith’s series of Tanktotems or Stankiewicz’s Soldier, or imagining fantastic weaponry in a state of ruination as in Spectre of Kitty Hawk, these works suggest their possible apotropaic ambition. 92

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Drawing on the long tradition of spoliation in which the appropriation of adversary ­materials into a new entity served as a means of controlling their powers—­and perhaps channeling the original apotropaic myth of Medusa whose petrifyingly grotesque visage was militarized on Perseus’s shield—­the postwar rise in welding as well as the renewed interest in the “art of the assemblage” brought powerful and often frightening signs of modern life into the contained and delimited realm of art. Such instances of sympathetic magic illustrate the principle of similia similibus ­curantur so that in the case of Tanktotem it would be the very “vulgar” and violent powers of the machine that such works might simultaneously rival and guard against.60 The motif of the sentinel that Smith and many other sculptors of his generation explored as discussed in the previous chapter would only be the most overt illustration for these works’ apotropaic motivations. In fact, Rosalind Krauss, in her pioneering analysis of Smith’s work, argued for a highly formalized sort of apotropaism at work in his sculptures. Recognizing the way that works like Oculus seem to eschew figural coherence so that the sculpture appears radically dissimilar when seen from different perspectives, Krauss proposed that this aspect would guard the sculpture’s imagery from what she described as a form of optical possession and thus demonstrate the radical contingency of embodied perception and indeterminacy of the dynamics of representation more generally.61 While modern sculpture’s appropriation of industrial methods and materials can be regarded as part of a much longer tradition of the fine arts’ assimilation of mass cultural procedures and motifs as a way to simultaneously distinguish themselves amid a cluttered image ecology and critically reflect on it, this act of incorporation may have served specific apotropaic functions, tempering the cultural anxieties surrounding the devastating power associated with these forms. This avoidance of perceptual coherence was but only one facet of the apotropaism at work in Smith’s sculptures and the work of many of his followers. With its monstrously ocular head supported by wand-­like appendages that seem to dynamically bend and stretch, Sentinel I from 1956 (see fig. 10) appears as a totemistic robot, suggesting a possible apotropaic function of these works: guarding off impending disaster by figuring the imagined result of such disaster in the grotesque assemblage of luminous metal scraps that seem to levitate in midair. With its six rectangular planes at its top projecting at different angles like a sign listing various far-­off destinations at a crossroads, Smith’s Sentinel epitomized how the sort of spatial expansiveness engendered by the new sculpture often took on decidedly technological and threatening connotations, so that a writer for Time noted how the work displayed “maximum strength with a maximum sense of space,” appearing “as ethereal as tomorrow’s TV aerials or as menacing as the latest rocket launcher.”62

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Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1962. Pencil on paper, 19¾ × 25½ in. (50.2 × 64.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Sarah-­Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky. (2580.2001)

Fig. 39.

The poet and critic Frank O’Hara picked up on these intimations, describing Smith’s sculptures in 1964 as warning viewers to be “on guard . . . don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.” According to O’Hara: “The primary passion in these sculptures is to avert catastrophe, or to sink beneath it in a grand way. So, as with the Greeks, Smith’s is a tragic art.”63 Similarly, Henry McBride saw Roszak’s equally daunting, eight-­foot-­tall sculpture Skylark as possibly “startling” viewers to “throw off their laziness and realize peremptorily that this particular moment in history warrants no laziness and that all of us had better be up and doing if we are to salvage anything at all from the desperateness of the times.” From such breathless oracular pronouncements, which works like Roszak’s frequently inspired in critics, McBride then proposed a much more modest, yet even more explicitly apotropaic purpose for the work, arguing that its presence in a dangerous area in Central Park “where the most hold-­ups occur,” would stave off such malicious behavior.64 Etymologically the word apotropaia denotes the act of turning away, and Krauss’s insight concerning Smith’s multiaxial compositions suggests how a work like Oculus, with its titular allusions to the primary apotropaic motif, “the evil eye,” might contain a deeper and more motivated engagement with this dynamic (which arguably found its most overt manifestation in what certain critics saw as a Medusa-­like figure in the 1945 94

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Theodore Roszak, Bell Tower for MIT Chapel, 1953–­55. Aluminum. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Fig. 40.

work Home of the Welder).65 In fact, the various holes and circles that appear in Smith’s work make such talismanic associations explicit, a facet of his work that other sculptors such as Seymour Lipton would routinely emphasize more dramatically with distinctly ocular motifs in works like Sentinel and Guardian in which enframed circular forms suggest monstrous eyes. The artist described the prevalence of “enclosed forms” within his work in terms of their apotropaic and possibly procreative capabilities, stating that “protection is necessary if there is to be growth.”66 Lee Bontecou explored an equally grotesque bio-­technological ocularity in many of her works that seemed to invite and repel vision in a distinctly talismanic manner. In many of her drawings from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the artist repeatedly investigated the way that encircled forms could capture the viewer’s attention in a mesmerizing way (fig. 39). These drawings suggest how the artist sought to produce similar points of focus through the multiple apertures that roughly circulate around the large round Sculpture and the Weapon

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recesses in the center of her works. In the untitled work from 1961 (see fig. 26), the presence of two blackened saw blades abutting each other form a grimace of sharp teeth. The series of small circular holes, frequently bound by a thick metal washer or rim, add to the works’ looming and threatening presence, suggesting eyes and bodily orifices, or as the same critic stated, “a jet pilot’s panels of nobs,” as well as “levers and scopes.”67 In a celebratory review from 1963, Donald Judd described how Bontecou’s “minatory” works seemed “capable of firing or swallowing,” suggesting how the work’s aggressive apertures could invite animistic associations.68 In a later essay dedicated to the work of Bontecou, Judd wrote that the “bellicose detail and the formidable holes” of the works “are experienced as one would experience a minatory object.”69 From Smith’s totemistic Sentinels and Tanktotems to Bontecou’s intimidating animistic war machines, a sense of watchfulness pervaded many examples of postwar sculpture. These works seem to “ward off worldly adversities while suffering them,” as one critic described Lipton’s Pioneer.70 Roszak made such apotropaic claims for the aerodynamic and distinctly rocket-­shaped spire he designed for Eero Saarinen’s equally space-­age chapel at MIT in 1955 (fig. 40), which drew on the architectural tradition of gargoyles as a “symbol to ward off evil spirits,” realigning this detail from its conventional axis pointing out perpendicular to the building to one “pointing up,” because,” as the artist noted, “it is from the sky now that danger threatens.”71 The multiple bas-­relief aluminum panels that Roszak created for the roof of the chapel, which would only be visible from an aerial perspective, direct the focus of his abstract gargoyle far above it, suggesting how the sky was literally the limit as well as the impetus for the spatial expansiveness of the new sculpture, the basis for its apotropaic impulse and very often, its intended aim.

AERIAL ART The often-­remarked-­on structural openness made possible by the welding technique promoted new ways of perceiving three-­dimensional art. Works by Smith and Roszak made the surrounding space and even the negative space within the sculpture newly perceivable and significant. The works’ structural openness also channeled an understanding of space that captured distinctly aerial and even cosmological connotations that were themselves becoming increasingly perceptible in a US culture that was barraged with information about the strategic necessities of aerial defense and astronautic exploration in the years following World War II. Radically reducing the mass and solidity of the sculptural object, welded metal allowed an unprecedented sense of weightlessness and aerodynamicism. Numerous artists creatively explored the formal possibilities facilitated by the strength of welded metals, making three-­dimensional works that 96

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teetered on a spindly linearity, dramatizing strikingly disproportional compositions. As sculpture became more open and transparent it was increasingly associated with the space in which it resided and in particular the “air space” that surrounded it and—­most notably—­reached far above the ground on which it was typically situated. The elevated status of sculptural space and its distinctly aerial associations is clearly documented in the photographs Smith took of his work in which the pieces are set against the rustic landscape of Bolton Landing, where he worked and often initially displayed his sculpture. As Sarah Hamill has persuasively shown, the artist frequently photographed his works from a low vantage point so that they appeared to be disconnected from the ground and, as she puts it “appear about to lift off in flight.”72 Sometimes photographing them after a snowfall, the sculptures lose nearly all sense of place and scale, and yet the preeminent presence of the sky behind them emphasizes how their open compositions and outspreading armatures occupy an expansive and notably aerial space (see fig. 11). By depicting his art in these conditions and from such angles Smith conveyed the ways in which the open and airy sculptural space created by the method of welding could be likened to more material notions of space, both terrestrial and celestial. One could understand Smith’s photographs as imaginatively portraying an idealized sculptural practice that addressed what he saw as the “natural constants” of the medium: “gravity, space, and hard objects.”73 Smith frequently invoked his desire to produce an art “that would rise from / water and tower in the air,” as he put it in a poem from around 1950.74 The artist’s comments reflect postwar sculpture’s much broader engagement with a certain conception of space that was understood to be extensive, mobile, and often dynamic (and which arguably would culminate in the phenomenologically inflected activation of the space typically associated with minimalism in the 1960s). The balloon-­shaped form that rises from the horizontal axis of Oculus emblematizes the sense of antigravitational weightlessness and equipoise that was pervasive in much of Smith’s sculpture from the 1950s. Likewise, this tendency to emphasize aerial ascension was thematized in the prevalence of avian motifs in the various Spectres and Ravens and in works such as Jurassic Bird (1945), and, more abstractly, in an open composition of interpenetrating forms from 1951 titled Flight. Critics frequently acknowledged this aerodynamic aspect of Smith’s art. One writer remarked how Smith’s Adagio Dancer “appears to have the faculty to gyrate through space,” while Fairfield Porter described how the open welded form “adapts itself to the air and surrounding space; there may be no core; its transparency in the air makes the difference between different views of it relatively insignificant.”75 Smith himself repeatedly acknowledged this aerial mode of vision as a crucial inspiration for his work: “I seem to view it [my work] as from the traveling height of a plane two miles up, or from my mountain workshop viewing a cloud-­like procession. When in Sculpture and the Weapon

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Fig. 41. David Smith, Hudson River Landscape, 1951. Steel and stainless steel, 48¾ × 721⁄8 × 173⁄8 in. (123.8 × 183.2 × 44.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase. (54.14)

my shop I see the clouds. When I am in the clouds I am there to look at my work. From there importances become pattern—­depth, bulk are not so evident.”76 In Smith’s Hudson River Landscape (fig. 41) the artist provides what seems like an abstract cartographic depiction of land seen from above, making explicit the aerial view that is indicated in the artist’s photograph of the work against the open sky of his Bolton Landing studio. The curator Allen Weller recognized this fractured mode of vision in Smith’s sculpture, writing that viewers “seem to look at things from above, from below, in profile, in a kind of symbolic perspective which makes of the spectator a moving element, and which gains in power because of the actual space which is a background to the total experience.”77 The “aerial impact” of Smith’s art registered a much broader engagement with what could be called nonlateral modes of sculptural beholding in the postwar years.78 In the 1940s Isamu Noguchi made the cartographic allusions of Smith’s works explicit and produced sculptural situations that literally put viewers in the position of viewing his sculptures from above. Drawing on the example of Giacometti’s Woman with 98

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Isamu Noguchi, This Tortured Earth, 1942–­43 (cast 1963). Bronze, 3 × 281⁄8 × 29 in. (7.6 × 71.4 × 73.7 cm). The Noguchi Museum, New York.

Fig. 42.

Her Throat Cut (1932), which was situated directly on the gallery floor so that viewers had to look down on the sculpture, and on his own interest in architectural models that typically presented a three-­dimensional topographic rendering of a structure, Noguchi explored the metaphorical relationship between the sculptural base, whether floor or pedestal, as terrestrial ground. Produced in 1942 in response to the ravages of wartime bombing, This Tortured Earth (fig. 42) imagines a blasted landscape as seen from high above.79 Measuring a little over two feet square, the work when placed directly on the floor provided viewers with a sense of their own elevation high above the object, placing them, figuratively, in the position of the bombardier-­perpetrator. In his Memorial to Man (fig. 43), Noguchi imagined an even higher elevation and an even more dramatic sense of temporal belatedness and ruination. Created in 1947, when the sustained threat of aerial bombardment became an existential condition as well as a military strategy, the work expresses what the artist saw as humanity’s “rather precarious . . . place on earth.” Noguchi’s memorial only exists as a photograph of a dramatically lit sand model for the monument taken standing over it, imagining the piece in “some unwanted area,” such as a desert and reaching many miles in length so that it would only be visible from above.80 This proposed scale for the memorial is insinuated in the title he later gave to it, Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars, suggesting the truly global if not astronomical proportions that were typically associated with the aerial perspective especially when paired with the threat of bombardment. In works like Smith’s Sentinel I, the sharp, angled protuberances that seemed to defy gravity and that were placed nearly seven feet from the ground so that most Sculpture and the Weapon

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Isamu Noguchi, Memorial to Man (Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars), 1947. Sand (unrealized model).

Fig. 43.

viewers had to look up to see them dramatized their extension into the surrounding space around them. Yet the imagined aerial perspective of works like This Tortured Earth can be understood as expressing the ideal and ultimate limits of the new sculpture’s rhetoric of spatial expansiveness. Many museumgoers would have already been trained in such modes of spectatorship through a series of popular exhibitions mounted at MoMA in the mid-­1940s that used innovative display techniques to address the social and historical imperatives of the nation at war. These shows, organized by Edward Steichen, who served as the curator of photography at the museum, and designed by Bauhaus émigré Herbert Bayer, featured large-­scale photomurals that were dramatically installed on curving walls and hung from poles, giving the images a decidedly sculptural quality. Reviewing the first of these shows, The Road to Victory (fig. 44), which opened in the spring of 1942 only months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, one critic recognized the unprecedented dynamism of the radical—­and notably affective if not expressive—­ mode of display, writing that the photographs “don’t sit quietly against the wall. They jut out from the walls and up from the floors to assault your vision.”81 The following year ­Steichen and Bayer explored these dramatic and participatory exhibition strategies even further in the exhibition Airways to Peace, a show that, according to the catalog essay written by the poet Wendell Wilke, examined the “new geographical dimension” 100

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Installation view of the exhibition Road to Victory at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 21–­October 4, 1942. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. (IN182.31)

Fig. 44.

brought about by the air travel. Opening in the fall of 1943 (when both Grippe’s City and Guernica, Picasso’s jeremiad against aerial bombardment, were on view), the exhibition sought to educate visitors on the “new uses of the airplane,” a technology that was responsible for the “global war” in which the “vast vague geography of the past” was transformed “into one small undividable globe.”82 Viewers were repeatedly invited to look through installations made from Plexiglas or walk among the taut cords stretched from the floor to the ceiling at various angles meant to suggest the trajectories of aircraft (fig. 45). Most remarkable was the “Outside-­In Globe,” in which visitors could see flight trajectories both from the imagined perspective of space or, more counterintuitively, deep within the molten core of the planet. The prevalence of globes and maps illustrated the exhibition’s paradoxical theme of global peace through military might, which in many ways motivated all of Steichen’s photomural extravaganzas, exemplified in the title of the third and final of the wartime shows, Power in the Pacific and in many ways informing the most famous realization of Steichen’s photomural installations, The Family of Man (1955), in which the prior exhibitions’ rhetoric of war and world peace would be theatrically dramatized in the show’s penultimate image of a mushroom cloud taken from the series of nuclear bomb tests at the Bikini Atoll, presented, uniquely, in color as a light box in a darkened room.83 Sculpture and the Weapon

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Installation view of the exhibition Airways to Peace at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 2–­October 31, 1943. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

Fig. 45.

The sculptural and spatially active displays of these exhibitions (whose simple geometric forms that occupy the same space as the viewer can be seen to prefigure the phenomenological mode of address associated with minimalist sculpture) demonstrate the increased awareness of spatial practice and in particular an expansive and often monumental understanding of space.84 This overriding concern for space, in both its particularly sculptural manifestations and its more material conceptions, permeates the discussion that took place on February 12, 1952, at MoMA during a symposium about “The New Sculpture” that featured Smith, Ferber, Roszak, and Richard Lippold. Besides Smith’s already cited remarks about the “cloudlike procession” of works he envisioned, Herbert Ferber described his engagement with space in equally materialist terms, stating that “contemporary sculpture . . . achieves a good deal of its excitement from the way in which it extends in space. Its principal sign is that of extension and often it is not extension from a central mass but rather extension in and about space in such a way that the space becomes part of the sculpture; it is not displaced by the work as water is when a ship is launched. The sculpture moves in space, it pierces and hold space in tension.”85 In his contribution Roszak likewise invoked material correlates to describe his work’s 102

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Richard Lippold, Variation Number 7: Full Moon, 1949–­50. Brass rods, nickel-­chromium, and stainless steel wire, 10 × 6 × 6 ft. (305 × 183 × 183 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. (241.1950)

Fig. 46.

spatial engagement, declaring that “instead of looking at densely populated man-­made cities, [my sculpture] now begins by contemplating the clearing.” Yet Richard Lippold presented the most overt statement of the ambitiously expansive notion of space in the “new sculpture.” In an effort to show the audience what he called the “environment” for “creative man” in the modern world, Lippold presented a two-­minute film made from “an automatic camera mounted on a rocket which reached a height of eighty miles above the earth, producing, visually, the most objective view ever seen of this place in infinity we narrow-­mindedly call ‘home.’ ” For Lippold, this astronautical perspective had political ramifications that, remarkably, wouldn’t become popular until over a decade later when images of the “Whole Earth” seen from space became a symbol of the counterculture’s global and ecological ethos.86 “Socially,” he stated, “this film shows that the whole earth is already united, not only in concept, but in fact. It is here to see. It is but a unit in infinite space, merely a Point, without East, West, North, or South . . . this film is for me a truly ecstatic experience.”87 In sculptures such as Variation Number 7: Full Moon (fig. 46), Lippold sought to achieve this disorienting, all-­encompassing, “ecstatic” spatial experience by constructing large-­scale, complex nearly symmetrical configurations of thin metal wires delineating geometrical forms, in some ways translating the flight trajectories represented in Airways to Peace into autonomous works of art. A series of concentric cubes rendered out of Sculpture and the Weapon

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thin wire radiating from the center of the work draws the viewer’s eye to its upper-­and lowermost reaches while the 45 degree angles produced by the surrounding brass rods direct the gaze outward in lateral directions. When the sculpture was first exhibited at the 15 Americans exhibition at MoMA in 1952, the ten-­foot-­tall structure was hung from the ceiling of a dramatically lit small gallery whose ceiling and floor were painted black and whose walls were covered in black velvet so that the thin nickel-­chromium and stainless steel wires seemed to flicker in and out of material presence. For certain critics works such as Full Moon resembled “aerial rigging and radar antennas more than sculpture.” 88 For Lippold, who trained as an industrial designer, such technological allusions spoke to the larger social and epistemological significance of his art.In fact, the artist articulated such associations himself in a 1951 essay in which he contrasted his work to a photograph of a television antenna.89 Lippold’s sculptures addressed themselves to a world in which it seemed that the highest forms of human ingenuity were engaged with dematerialized forms of technology, a world in which, as he put it, “our faith is in space, energy, and communications, not in pyramids and cathedrals.”90 Space, he claimed, “has transformed all areas of contemporary existence. In medicine, the outer man is being destroyed to reveal his inner motivations and their reactions to his exterior form; in politics, external physical boundaries are being destroyed to find inner tensions and relationships . . . science destroys outer forms, both tangible and intangible, to discover the ones of energy, freely existing in space-­time.”91 According to Lippold, in a century when “we don’t look at things, we look through them,” the use of “hair-­thin metals to sculpt space and its surroundings” could “seduce the viewer to look into the space” that encompassed their bodies and everything else around them.92 Sculpture thus becomes a means of spatial awareness, if not of literal space exploration, inviting viewers to perceive realms of space far beyond the work itself and recognize its crucial role within a technological society. Lippold’s sculptures took the weightless, antigravitational implications of welded metal sculpture to their apparent conclusions, literally suspended in space and frequently signifying space through their planetary and stellar allusions. In the works like The Sun, Variations within a Sphere No. 10, which he was commissioned to produce for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1953 largely in response to the popularity of the installation of The Moon at MoMA (where it resided in a separate dark alcove for twenty-­five years after its initial display in the 15 Americans show), the vastness of outer space as well as its unfathomable emptiness is summoned through the airy expansion of wires radiating in multiple directions.93 With their hairline precision and geometric patterning, Lippold’s metal sculptures indicated the close correspondence between astronomy and technology in midcentury American culture, in which rocketry provided the means of cosmic exploration as well as long distance bombardment (and more subtly the threat 104

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Frederick Kiesler, Galaxy, 1947–­48 (base remade 1951). Wood and rope, 11 ft. 11 in. × 13 ft. 10 in. × 14 ft. 3 in. (363.2 × 421.6 × 434.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller. (32.1991.a–­n)

Fig. 47.

of such missiles largely motivated the exploration and possible colonization of space). The artist acknowledged the connection between the US space program and its military endeavors in a statement he gave in a CBS News special report, “Nearer to Thee,” which ran immediately after the televised lunar landing on July 20, 1969, in which he trenchantly described the Apollo mission as a way to “divert peoples’ attention” from events like the failed invasion of Cuba.94 The heightened sensitivity to space, in both its sculptural and astronomical senses, evident in Lippold’s Moon, would have been particularly pronounced when Moon was first exhibited in the 15 Americans exhibition, appearing alongside Frederick Kiesler’s Galaxy (fig. 47), a work Alfred Barr described as “architecture for sky-­gazers.”95 Towering over twelve feet tall and equally wide at the intersecting beams of wood at its base, the work envelopes the viewer. Kiesler’s Galaxy was, he claimed, “both to be lived with and lived within,” an example of what he called “space sculpture,” which would integrate art into “the context of this expanding environment.”96 The artist, who was Sculpture and the Weapon

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Fig. 48.

Ibram Lassaw, Clouds of Magellan, 1952. Installation at the Brick House, New Canaan, Connecticut.

best known as an architect but who practiced painting and sculpture, explicated the spatial impact of his works in his peculiar theory of “correalism,” which emphasized the essential intermediary and relational role of space in all forms of creation and perception. The artist envisioned multiple iterations of his Galaxies, and besides the version shown at MoMA, which was subsequently purchased by museum trustee Nelson Rockefeller, planned to create another iteration for Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Although this second version was never created it would have added to the already quite overt astronomical sculptural program of the architecture, residing alongside Ibram Lassaw’s Clouds of Magellan, which was named after two small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way (fig. 48). Hovering above in an alcove in the guest house, the work’s spindly golden lattice summons the cosmos through the constellated clusters of wire. The complex circuitry of the sculpture, lacking any definitive center or solidity, bends in rough right angles both laterally and projecting upward and downward, occupying real space as it suggests its expansive scope far beyond its material boundaries. The work, hung above a bed, invited a decidedly skyward mode of perception so that as one critic noted, “lying flat on his back the sleeper can look straight up and into it from his pillow.” 97 106

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Like Kiesler and Lippold (as well as Peter Grippe who also referred to his sculptures as “space constructions” and “space figures”), Lassaw emphasizes these cosmological associations in the titles of his works, such as Star Cradle (1949); Milky Way, subtitled A Polymorphic Space (1950); and Fragment from Aldebaran (named after the brightest star in the constellation Taurus).98 Moreover, like these artists, Lassaw recognized how such “space constructions” were specifically “pertinent to our technological age.”99 Lassaw saw himself as creating a “sculpture of relativity” in which “the polymorphous relationships” of his compositions related to “the starry structures in three-­dimensional outerspace” as well as the “atomic scale of existence,” which “suggests a world of relationships at a distance, fields of force, processes.”100 These broader cultural associations were picked up by one writer who described how Johnson took on “the role of director in a science-­fiction adventure” when he used “a variant dimmer which controlled the light as in a movie theater . . . to throw mysterious lengthening shadows” on the work.101 Emphatically theatrical and arguably decorative, the Clouds of Magellan can be seen as refining but hardly renouncing the vulgarity that Smith valued so much in the practice of welded sculpture. Both artists’ works, with their airy, open compositions and signs of industrial technology, seemed to participate within the forms and the very space of a technologically advanced culture on the brink of a pioneering if perilous future.

THE POETICS OF POSTWAR SPACE AND MODERN OBLIVION This materialist, vulgar conception of space, one that could simultaneously attend to its contemporaneous connotations of astronautical exploration and its phenomenological correlation with lived experience, permeated postwar sculptural discourse. One can hardly read an article about the “new sculpture” (and there were a surprisingly large number of such assessments in the mid-­1950s) without hearing how these works represent “a new handling of space,” “a new and fundamental sense of space,” and “a new awareness of the relationship between the sculpture and the space in which it stands.”102 Writing in 1947, Herbert Ferber emphasized the spatial potency of the medium’s concrete actuality, writing that “there is something about contemporary sculpture, its extension in space, its body, its three-­dimensionality, which captures the attention on a level other than the imaginative, and which much be dealt with in a physical sense.” According to the artist these “prosaic” aspects of space explored by the new sculpture situated the works “in the same category with other bodies in space—­bottles, tables, people—­a category which lacks the values of art.”103 Ferber claimed to have discovered the “presence” such a “prosaic” encounter with sculpture could provide while traveling in Italy sometime during the war, likely in 1940.104 Visiting the Duomo in Florence, Ferber saw Donatello’s statues of Old Testament Sculpture and the Weapon

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prophets removed from their pedestals and placed on the floor on the cathedral (although he does not mention this) as a means of preventing damage from bombardment.105 Ferber described this revelation in his statement for the catalog of 15 Americans, recounting how “the confrontation with them, eye to eye, was overwhelming. There was a depth of form in which one could almost wonder, and a sense of mass and intimacy of which there was only an indication when they were in place.”106 Whereas, he notes in a related text, seeing Donatello’s sculpture’s high above in their niches presented them as “images,” when the works were placed on the floor, in the same space as the viewer, they became objects of experience. “Seeing them face to face,” he wrote, “was to feel presences.”107 Ferber’s description of this transformation of visual imagery to phenomenological vitalism prefigures the conventional art historical account of minimalism’s rejection of modernist autonomy, suggesting how a significant body of sculpture of the 1950s was already exploring the spatial expansiveness of the medium (and how this new attentiveness to space was oftentimes influenced by the exigencies of modern warfare). In fact, in an essay from 1954 simply titled “On Sculpture,” Ferber formulated his conception of the work’s relationship to the surrounding space in which it is viewed. He wrote that “the idea that sculpture inherited” from the traditional concept of the monolith “was a ‘centripetal’ one: sculpture was tied to its own center.” Contemporary sculpture, he goes on to state, “has now become an art of extension. It has become ‘centrifugal,’ and, in the work I admire, it shuns the center.” If traditional sculpture “had been solid, closed,” the new work “is now an art of open, airy, discontinuous forms, suspended in space.” Moreover, this engagement with space takes on an almost expressive force so that viewers become “involved with these spaces, as if there were a kinetic compulsion to move into them and about them.”108 Inspired by his experience in Florence, as well as other premodernist examples such as Michelangelo’s Sagrestia Nuova in the Medici Chapel in Florence and Egyptian tombs, where, as he put it, “sculpture inhabited the space” and the artist “created an architectural environment for his sculpture,” Ferber began exploring this centrifugal conception of sculpture as environment.109 In works like Apocalyptic Rider (1947), the artist invested the object’s multiple appendages that jut out into various directions with an animistic sense of motion (fig. 49). Ferber’s exploration of calligraphic shapes that seem to be poised to project themselves beyond the sculpture’s material extremities emphasized the expressive potential of an art of extension. In works like these Ferber sought to produce what he called a “surrational space” that was “charged with form, sprung, tense as a steel coil.”110 Titles of other works from the period such as The Act of Aggression (1947), Ominous Shadow (1947), and Hazardous Encounter (1947) indicate the threatening mood such spatial extension was meant to express.

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Herbert Ferber, Apocalyptic Rider, 1947. Bronze, 44½ × 38 × 25 in. (113 × 88.9 × 63.5 cm). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. Gift of the artist. (1962.53)

Fig. 49.

By the mid-­1950s Ferber had examined the architectural implications of his vision of a centrifugally expansive art in a series of “roofed sculptures” that were inspired by the model-­like armature of Giacometti’s Palace at 4 AM. Works like Homage to P ­ iranesi (fig. 50) represent what E. C. Goosen called a “desire for containment” in Ferber’s sculpture after 1954, in which “the framing sides, though neutralized by their sheer austerity, are nevertheless planes fighting to hold that which does not wish to be held, and which must yet by virtue of needed support consent to be so held. . . . [Yet] the principle holding these seeming bursting forces together lies in a denial of their ability to actually exert real pressure.”111 As Goosen’s remarks suggest, the power of Ferber’s sculpture was understood to be in its portrayal of threatening energy barely restrained by human ingenuity, providing a potent allegory for what was seen in the postwar years as the existential and phenomenological effects of humanity’s perilous relationship with technology. In 1960 the artist began to consider enlarging the scale of these works and imparting the gallery itself with the role of containment so that the viewer could literally occupy the space where dynamic and often violent extension occurred. The ultimate Sculpture and the Weapon

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Herbert Ferber, Homage to Piranesi II, 1962–­63. Copper and brass, 90 × 46½ × 46½ in. (228.6 × 118.1 × 118.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of William Rubin, 1965.

Fig. 50.

result of this investigation was an untitled room-­sized sculptural “environment” commissioned by the Whitney Museum in New York in March 1961 that appeared to be an enlarged version of one of Ferber’s calligraphic sculptures, so large in fact that viewers could physically inhabit it. The photograph used on the cover of the small brochure for the exhibition (fig. 51), titled “To Create an Environment,” presented a female viewer gazing at the structure whose enormous scale dwarfs her, making her appear like the protagonist from the 1957 sci-­fi hit The Incredible Shrinking Man (whose diminished state is caused by radiation). Such allusions were reiterated in the short text by the show’s curator, John Baur, who situated Ferber’s project within the “destruction” of sculpture’s “solidity by the Constructivists,” which “released energies as astonishing as those of the atom.”112 Constructed from polyvinyl resin strips laid over a wire mesh armature, Ferber’s installation lacked the material nuance of his welded sculpture, leading most critics to find the piece “not entirely successful, or even less successful than that,” noting how the rather anonymous and austere gallery given over to the piece did not lend itself to the work’s stated ambitions. Nonetheless, Ferber’s “Sculpture as Environment” project suggested the possibilities of an environmental understanding of sculpture that would have important ramifications for the medium in the following decade, suggesting the expressive capacities of embodied space.113 110

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Installation view of the exhibition A Sculpture by Herbert Ferber: To Create an Environment at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 10–­April 21, 1961. Exhibition Records, 1961; Box 0031. Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, New York.

Fig. 51.

The dynamic, if not explosive, “centripetal” activation of space that Ferber sought to capture in his works was part of a much larger interest in spatial modes of extension and expression in postwar sculpture. As early as 1946 the critic Harold Clurman delineated the foremost modalities of welded metal sculpture, identifying “sharpness, explosiveness and harshness” as the chief qualities of Smith’s art, whose “real violence,” he notes, delivers “a high-­voltage shock.” Like many critics after him Clurman saw these attributes, especially when figured in welded metal, as abstract correlates for “the nervousness, conflict, horror of our day.” He goes on to surmise that “one almost expects to see them burst through the walls and take refuge in some more appropriate place than the rooms in which they are imprisoned”114 Seymour Lipton, who kept a photograph of a piece of metal destroyed by a bullet in his studio notes, similarly described the desired centrifugal power of his sculpture in the space it exists as what he called “the principle of visual plastic tension” in which “the total empty space assumes a tensional relation with the solid object within the frame of the three dimensional room as a frame of reference.” This sculptural activation of space, Lipton argues, “renders the object spatially intelligible and the surrounding space becomes part of the emotional experience of the Sculpture and the Weapon

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object itself,” an aspiration that was declared in a title of a sculpture from 1956, The Empty Room.115 Writing in 1953, Allen Weller described how the “transition from the sculpture of mass to the sculpture of space” has “led generally to a daring and aggressive style of symbolic imagery” so that modern sculpture acts “not as an object which stops the free movement of space, but as something which forces the surrounding space to assume powerful form itself.”116 Weller, who organized a remarkably diverse and thoughtful series of annual exhibitions from 1953 to 1964 at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, repeatedly underscored the new cultural and aesthetic contours of space, declaring it in 1963 to be “the one great international world-­wide preoccupation.” Weller understood the new sculpture’s “emphasis on space for its own sake” as a response to a world that “no longer seems to be under control and that it no longer seems possible to chart its future course with confidence.” The “sense of infinite boundlessness” that these works seemed to engender, brought about in part by their open and often hollow forms that thrust out into the surrounding space, registered “the essentially extrovert mobility of modern civilization.” For postmodern critics like Rosalind Krauss the novel mobility of modern sculpture suggested new formal possibilities as it destabilized long-­held conceptions of the medium. Yet Weller emphasized how this new form of spatial experience, at least when it was initially presented to viewers, “produces a new sense of fear” and contributes to the “anxiety and loneliness of modern man.”117 Like Herbert Read, who in 1952 coined the term “geometry of fear” to define the expressive use of welding in the work of many postwar British sculptors, and Jean-­Paul Sartre, who in an influential essay on Giacometti, published in 1948 for an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, described the sculptor’s capacity to “take the fat off space” as a way to address his “horror of the infinite,” Weller grasped the existential dread at the root of the new sculpture’s spatial expansiveness.118 Even more explicit was art critic James Fitzsimmons’s description of the range of expressive possibilities of postwar sculptural space. A sculptor may experience space as beckoning and exnihilating, in which case he will produce symbols of plunging or soaring. Space may terrify him, leading him to produce spiked wounding symbols of aggression and defense, apotropaic devices, elements of a fortified magic circle. Space may be experienced as confining, something to be broken, or “centrifugally,” as seething to be ­contained.119 Yet this attention to the affective potential of space transcended the sculptural medium and in certain ways informed the more well-­known modernist aesthetics associated with 112

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Clement Greenberg and typically associated with painting that emphasized the two-­ dimensional physical reality of the canvas “in all its brute literalness,” which the critic noted in an essay from 1954, exists in “the same spatial order as our bodies.”120 Five years earlier, in an essay titled “Our Period Style,” Greenberg analyzed the emergence of what the architectural historian J. M. Richards and Elizabeth Mock called the “twentieth-­century consciousness of space as continuous.” Greenberg goes on to cite Richards and Mock’s description of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first prairie houses, in which, they posit, “Space took on a life of its own. It became fluid, expansive, continuous from one room to another, and from inside to outside through bands of casement windows or great banks of glass doors.”121 Throughout the early 1950s Greenberg championed the new sculpture in terms of a similar “ ‘activation’ of empty space,” which freed it from its conventional existence as “a monolith more or less isolated from the space around it.” For “the modern sculptor,” space was conceived “more dynamically, as all pervasive and embracing” and the new techniques of welding allowed the works to “discount the law of gravity.”122 This heightened spatial awareness of postwar art has typically been understood in terms of a materialist positivism associated with Greenberg’s theory of modernism, which would later be translated and transformed into an equally materialist phenomenological approach frequently associated with the “discovery” of Merleau-­Ponty’s writings in the 1960s.123 A trajectory can thus be charted from the avowed “bodying forth” of nonrepresentational, optical paintings like those of Jackson Pollock to the physical embodiment of the artist in happenings (and Allan Kaprow’s description of the way Pollock’s paintings transformed viewers into “participants rather than observers”) to minimal art’s activation of the gallery space, producing, according to one critic, “a heightened awareness of one’s own relationship to the environment and to the object of perception through an emphasis on the relatedness of the sculptural object to its surroundings.”124 This conventional genealogy obscures both the sustained consideration of space in the sculpture of the 1950s and the way that space was understood to be expressively marshaled by artists, even long into the 1960s. For instance, in her review of a 1964 show titled Four Environments by New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery, the critic Lucy Lippard identified “a growing tendency . . . even in ‘straight paintings’ exhibitions, to surround the spectator, whose increased physical participation, or immediate sensorial reactions to the work of art, often operate at the expense of the more profound emotional involvements demanded by New York School painting in the fifties.”125 While this i­ncreased attention to space translated the expressive possibilities previously associated with the painterly gesture into three dimensions, it also suggested the possible ways in which space itself could be used expressively.

Sculpture and the Weapon

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These expressive connotations of space did not entirely disappear in the 1960s as new modes of artistic practice such as minimalism rose in prominence and made such work as Ferber’s seem fussy and recherché. In his catalog essay for the landmark Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum (1966), curator Kynaston McShine similarly recognized how a work like Dan Flavin’s corner monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (for P. K. who reminded me about death) (fig. 52) “intrudes aggressively on the spectator’s space.”126 Flavin himself described the even and undifferentiated fluorescent light emitted by his works as an “unfocused source coming out of a well-­defined instrument,” noting how the technological materials could nonetheless produce “uncontrollable” and “difficult and certainly incidental” effects.127 Flavin’s use of the term “incidental” suggests not only the way in which the artist’s i­ntention seems to diffuse as the light spreads beyond the fluorescent hardware but also its situational quality, the way it “particularized” what he described as “the volume of air space” of the gallery, making each unique encounter with the work an “incident.”128 The following year these forceful if not belligerent connotations were further codified in the Scale as Content exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art where Barnett Newman debuted his Broken Obelisk alongside equally monumental works by Ronald Bladen and Tony Smith. The accompanying essay, written by Eleanor Green, described how the “awesome scale” of these works “is a function of the way the forms appear to expand and continue beyond their physical limitations, acting aggressively on the space around them and compressing it.” As in McShine’s description of Flavin’s fluorescent monument, Green describes the “experience” such works engendered as decidedly ­affective if not expressive, noting how they can be “exhilarating or even frightening.”129 If the dictates of modernism directed artists to consider the essential limitations of their chosen medium, the spatial engagement of sculpture provided ways beyond such doctrinaire notions. Ferber’s recollection of seeing Donatello’s prophets placed on the floor of the Duomo in Florence, which led to his increasing interest in the spatial ­address of sculpture, reveals what can be considered the latent and largely unexplored role of ­aerial bombardment and more generally military architecture in postwar sculpture. Tony Smith’s famous ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike (cited in Michael Fried’s extensive and still largely definitive critique of minimalism, “Art and Objecthood,” as exemplifying the boundless and endless aesthetic of the new sculpture) would also bear the traces of militaristic might. In the same passage cited by Fried, Smith mentions other examples of spatial construction that offered a similar effect to his experience on the New Jersey Turnpike. Later I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe—­ abandoned works, surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any func114

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Dan Flavin, monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P. K. who reminded me about death), 1966. Red fluorescent light, width 96 in. (244 cm), depth 72 in. (183 cm). Dia Art Foundation.

Fig. 52.

tion, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me. There is a drill ground in Nuremberg, large enough to accommodate two million men. The entire field is enclosed with high embankments and towers. The concrete approach is three sixteen-­inch steps, one above the other, stretching for mile or so.130 Fried, in a footnote to “Art and Objecthood,” points out that Smith’s example is “perhaps not without significance”131 In a society, as President Eisenhower warned, in danger of falling under the “total influence—­economic, political, even spiritual” of “the military establishment” and where citizens were asked to “watch the skies” for the lightning-­fast trajectories of missiles and planes and consider the possibility of survival underground in shelters or in interstellar colonies to reconcile the possibility of a ruined earth and the extermination of civilization, such visions of minatory emptiness indeed seem far from arbitrary or without significance.132 For Fried, Smith’s recognition of the possible affinities between the open-­ended and art-­ending experience on the New Jersey Turnpike and these abandoned military structures in Germany demonstrated the latent—­ and largely pernicious—­ politics ­augured by an art that eschewed authorial intention and aesthetic evaluation. Yet this frequently cited passage also serves as just one more instance of the ways that postwar sculptural practice were understood in terms of a distinctly threatening and militarized sense of space. Sculpture and the Weapon

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PARTIALLY BURIED WOODSHED (R. SMITHSON)

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CHAPTER THREE NEW MONUMENTS AND REVERSED RUINS

The term “avant-­garde” ought to be restored to the French Army where its manic sense of futility propitiously belongs. It does not apply to any American art that I know about. — dan

flavin ,

“some remarks . . . excerpts from a spleenish journal,” Artforum (December 1966)

The dominance of the machine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately we have not yet reached such a state. — norbert

wiener ,

The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

Because of its associations with statuary and the durability of its traditional materials, sculpture has long been associated with monumentality. In many regards classical sculpture established the terms of the medium’s fundamental monumentalism: a figural materialization of a subject that would perpetuate its memory across time. Unlike painting and works on paper, which are relatively portable and fragile, sculpture has typically suggested permanence, ensuring its capacity to outlast the lives of its immediate audiences more assuredly than other artistic media. Even examples of modern, ostensibly abstract sculpture that did not exhibit overtly commemorative subject matter often conveyed these connotations of perpetuity across time through their stable materials, physical heft, and extension into actual space. As Rosalind Krauss notes in her influential essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” the medium often shared what she calls “the logic of the monument” in the way that both forms have traditionally been seen to impart their surroundings with significance and vice versa, allowing the work to “mediate between actual site and representational sign.” For Krauss the innovations of modern sculpture, beginning with the “sitelessness” of Rodin’s monumental Gates of Hell and his statue of Balzac and finding its ultimate manifestation in the Dada readymade and the cubist adoption of the welding torch, 117

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brought an unprecedented degree of physical mobility and aesthetic autonomy to the sculptural object, investing it with what she described as a nomadic homelessness that occupied “the negative condition of the monument.”1 Yet this modernist antimonumentalism, according to Krauss, gave way to an array of three-­dimensional practices that began to emerge in the second half of the 1960s in which the position of the sculptural object within its surrounding environment became a crucial component of its formal semblance and aesthetic identity. Many of these works, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which was sited on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1970, were permanently installed within specific landscapes, taking on the characteristics of architecture and landscape design, practices that had previously been considered largely outside the purview of the medium of sculpture. Although Krauss never describes them as such, these works that operated in an “expanded field” of sculptural practices represented what could be called a postmodern and postmedium renewal of sculptural monumentalism. In fact, numerous artists of this period, including Smithson, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg, created nominal—­if typically ironic—­monuments. Others, like Richard Serra and Michael Heizer, produced works whose large scale and invocations of duration, both phenomenological and historical, would exhibit a discernable engagement with the form’s essential engagement with time. Focusing on the spatial “logic” of the monument, Krauss’s analysis does not account for the equally significant temporal dimension of the form that was fundamental to all of the just-­mentioned examples of postmodern monumentalism.2 Understanding monumentality only in terms of scale, though, obscures the form’s equally essential attri­bute of temporal expansiveness, the way that the monument marks time through its persistence in space, registering both a remembered past and an implied future in which it will persevere. The spatial stability of the monument thus ensures a certain temporal continuity, and one might say that monuments aim to transmit a vision of a particular future into a greater unknown future, one in which their significance remains visible, if not remembered or relevant. In this regard, monuments, at least as they have been traditionally understood, are fundamentally conservative objects, seeking to shape the future not as an avant-­garde revolution, but aspiring for the more moderate promise of a certain degree of constancy, both material and mnemonic, within the inevitable flux of time. And while this apparent conservatism marked the monument as an object of critique and even parody for many modern and postmodern artists, it did not entirely stop the use of the concept by artists and critics in the postwar period, typically to address aspects of the object’s size and spatial expansiveness.3 Nor did it prevent the creation of more recognizable instances of the form in civic monuments during the postwar period. 118

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Eero Saarinen, Gateway Arch, 1963–­65. Stainless steel cladding, 630 × 630 × 54 ft. (192 × 192 × 16.5 m). National Park Service, Saint Louis, Missouri.

Fig. 53.

Despite the growing sense that traditional monuments were, as the architectural historian Andrew Shanken puts it, deemed not able to adequately “represent death in an age of mechanical destruction” (and perhaps unredeemably tainted by fascist governments’ appropriation of classicism), the monument, both as form and content, did not entirely perish.4 Indeed, one could argue that it was precisely the sense of its inadequacy to address the sort of modern, technological war that had recently taken place that prompted a number of sculptural reconsiderations of the concept in the postwar era. In fact, some major national commissions for national monuments took place in the years following World War II, including those for proposed memorials to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy in 1960 and 1963 respectively. Perhaps most architecturally notable was Eero Saarinen’s 1947 design of a stainless steel inverted catenary for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in Saint Louis (fig. 53). Not completed until 1967, and seven years after the architect’s death, delayed because of a series of budgetary issues, the Gateway Arch, with its dynamic, gravity-­defying contour and relatively unorthodox New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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­ aterials (at the time stainless steel was used more for domestic and industrial appliancm es than architecture), indicated a way to reinterpret classical monumental forms such as the triumphal arch into a nonrepresentational and decidedly modern idiom.5 Abstract approaches likewise dominated the proposals for the international competition in 1951 for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, a project sponsored by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Of the over two thousand proposals submitted from fifty-­seven countries, most sought to translate aspects of the heroic tradition of monumental statuary into the modern lexicon of welded metal.6 The British artist Reg Butler, who had already developed a well-­recognized approach to welded sculpture, creating linear, mantis-­like figures out of metal wire, ultimately was awarded the commission, although the monument itself was never built owing primarily to the lack of sufficient funding (despite likely support by the CIA who sought to present advanced modern art as a foil to the apparent threat of avowedly ego-­deadening and market-­hindering communism).7 Numerous commentators compared Butler’s bronze maquette mounted on a rough, painted stone to a hybrid watchtower and radio antenna. Another sort of abstraction was evident in a distinctly new model of monumentality that became quite prevalent in the postwar landscape of the United States: the so-­called living ­memorial. By christening public structures like auditoriums, civic centers, and highways as memorial projects, these living memorials altered the typical dynamic of monumental remembrance, bringing the commemorative experience into a remarkably mundane sense of time, “reinscribing them,” as Shanken writes, “onto activities in the present, such as driving or doing errands, thereby altering consciousness of history.”8

IRONIC AND IRENIC MONUMENTS The living memorials of the postwar era, with their notable lack of figurative imagery, their spatial expansiveness, and their mundane banality, can thus be seen as architectural analogues to the renaissance of the concept that took place within the advanced sculptural practice of the same period.9 As sculpture—­and arguably art in general—­ began to be seen as activating its surrounding space, whether the gallery or the external landscape, becoming in the postmodern parlance, “site specific,” many artists and critics reevaluated the monument as a viable modern form.10 For a number of observers, the nonobjective impersonality that characterized minimalist sculpture coupled with the works’ typically imposing larger-­than-­life size imparted the new works with a certain sense of monumentality. For instance, Kynaston McShine, writing in the catalog for the 1966 Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum, described the works in the show as having “a physical concreteness and unity that is both elegant and monumental.”11 The same year Robert Morris repeatedly invoked the concept in his essay 120

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“Notes of Sculpture” as a paradigm for the way the new works invited nonpsychological modes of aesthetic experience and its related degree of “publicness.”12 These canonical instances of what could be called minimalist monumentalism were no doubt prompted by some of the more overt and categorical engagements with the genre that appeared in the middle of 1960s. Beginning in 1964 Dan Flavin started to designate his nominally untitled fluorescent sculptures as monuments, often bestowing parenthetical supplements to their titles commemorating individuals like Vladimir Tatlin and the art historian Robert Rosenblum.13 In his corner monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P. K. who reminded me about death), which was included in the Primary Structures exhibition, the artist provided the sort of memorial significance—­and martial subject matter—­more characteristically associated with traditional monuments erected in the public sphere (see fig. 52). First exhibited at a moment when the United States was involved in an increasingly unpopular war ostensibly fought to keep a small portion of Southeast Asia from becoming “red,” Flavin’s monument was surely experienced by attentive gallery-­goers as an ominous reminder of the events overseas, if not a strident antiwar statement. Such associations were recognized by Patti Smith, who in her memoir vividly describes the effect of sitting beneath the red glow of Flavin’s monument in the back room of Max’s Kansas City, a bar on lower Park Avenue patronized by 1960s art world insiders, where it hung from 1966 to 1968 after its initial appearance in Primary Structures. Smith writes, “Everyone [was] bathed in the blood light of the backroom. Dan Flavin had conceived his installation in response to the mounting death toll of the war in Vietnam. No one in the back room was slated to die in Vietnam, though few would survive the cruel plagues of a generation.”14 For Smith, Flavin’s imposing monument, with its eerie red light that permeated the bodies of the denizens of Max’s, served as a sort of monumental sentinel, allegorizing the inescapability of history, even for a generation largely determined to do so.15 Flavin’s monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush is atypical of his larger oeuvre not only in its figurative allusiveness, with its long red light jutting out from the gallery corner like a mortar gun, but also in the evocation of military casualties in its title. Unlike Flavin, Claes Oldenburg repeatedly created monuments that referred to war and expressed a discernable political and even antiwar sentiment. Beginning in 1965 the artist created a series of loose and liquescent drawings depicting imaginary and oftentimes impossible monuments that were typically sited in actual ­public ­spaces. Building on the artist’s practice of creating sketches envisaging his large-­scale soft sculptures of pop iconography situated within a specific location in New York City, “throwing,” as he put it, “enlarged versions of one of my objects onto the Face of New York,” these proposed monuments emphasized their colossal scale in relation to their environment.16 These juxtapositions typically had particular political significance so that New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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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. Charcoal and watercolor on paper, 16 × 12 in. (40.6 × 30.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bequest of Alicia Legg. (413.2002)

Fig. 54.

a large fan replacing the Statue of Liberty would commemorate immigration—­or more precisely the policies that often sought to thwart it—­or a titanic ironing board placed in the Lower East Side would honor the dreary and typically unseen labor that historically occurred in that neighborhood. Taking the form’s association with colossal scale to cartoonish proportions, Oldenburg’s proposed monuments typically served as inescapable reminders for events that society generally wished to forget. In a similar vein Robert Morris would produce a set of lithographs in 1970 entitled Five War Memorials that imagined large-scale interventions in the landscape such as a smoking crater and scattered atomic waste. This drive to impose an uncomfortable fact within a public space was crucial to Oldenburg’s Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway, N.Y.C.—­Block of Concrete, Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes (fig. 54). Although the artist claimed that the initial inspiration for the work’s simple geometric form came from a group of sketches depicting a rectangular pat of butter on top of a baked potato, the stark, simple, and massive cube, when isolated invokes the nonrepresentational geometry of minimalism, as if a work like Smith’s Die (fig. 55) was enlarged and cast in concrete, making the morbid allusion in Smith’s title explicit. Or perhaps one might say that Oldenburg’s cenotaph reveals the funerary connotations that suffused so much minimalist sculpture, from Lucy Lippard’s claim that the “primary structurists” introduced 122

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Tony Smith, Die, 1962 (fabricated 1968). Steel with oiled finish, 72 × 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 × 182.9 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of the Collectors Committee. (2003.77.1)

Fig. 55.

“a new kind of funeral monument,” to Elizabeth Baker’s description of a Plexiglas and steel box by Judd as “a silver coffin imbedded in a warm, wet volume of honey” to John Perreault calling Judd’s works “last-­minute tombstones” for “American space” and “the American dream,” a dream, he notes, “that is on the brink of becoming a nightmare.”17 To a certain extent these allusions to graves and tombstones reflect the deep-­seated tradition of monumental statuary that continued to inform the categorically sculptural discourse of minimalism, so that the relation between sculpture and box seemed to summon the tomb’s or cenotaph’s respective functions of corporeal containment or absence.18 The sculpture-­as-­tomb metaphor also implied an unconventional directionality to the spatial expansiveness of sculpture, guiding the spectator’s attention downward, not only to the gallery floor but even, in some cases like Oldenburg’s War Memorial, below it. Oldenburg stated that he “wanted it to be like a wound in the city.” This civic injuriousness was acknowledged by the artist, who noted that architecture students from Cornell University “did a study and found that concrete in that quantity would sink through and New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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crush the subways below.”19 Like a minimalist sculpture, the work would have formidable effects on its physical surroundings. While the proposed monument’s potential for the collapse of its surroundings might in some way symbolically mirror, or more precisely prefigure, the sort of destruction it commemorates, it also could be seen as a means of preventing such damage through its capacity to serve as what the artist called an “obstacle monument.”20 Like Christo and Jeanne-­Claude’s Iron Curtain of empty oil barrels that the couple stacked in a narrow Paris street on July 26, 1962, as a “one day” monument to protest the erection of the Berlin Wall the year before, Oldenburg’s proposed monument would prevent all traffic from using the typically busy streets of Lower Manhattan. This function of the work is perhaps suggested in the sketches that depict the area surrounding the monument devoid of any cars or people. The artist claimed to have chosen this location because “studies have indicated, in fact, that the intersection of Canal and Broadway, where the memorial would be, is the perfect spot to drop the H-­bomb in order to create maximum damage and fallout throughout the New York area.”21 Thus, Oldenburg’s monument to the war dead would serve as a sort of prophylactic for future war-­related casualties by ensuring the vacancy of a known bombing target. As such the work can be seen to literalize the apotropaic function of the industrial totems of the previous generation of sculptors like David Smith and Theodore Roszak. The artist Dan Graham, in an essay titled “Oldenburg’s Monuments,” acknowledged this possible purpose of the work, noting how, “by blocking the intersection of the four streets, the War Memorial, by precipitating their occurrence, a priori memorialized ‘natural disasters’ such as war.”22 (In this sense the original iconography suggests a clever reversal of the old saying about putting guns before butter. Here butter serves as a shield against bombs.) Perverting and parodying classical motifs with their respective preposterously colossal renditions of everyday items and unembellished “ ‘columns’ of light” (Graham’s words), both Oldenburg and Flavin brought a distinctly ironic and, to borrow a rather obscure word cited by Graham in his discussion of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 “Bed Peace,” irenic—­meaning peace-­making—­attitude to their monuments.23 While one could argue that his monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush sought to generate a distinctly antiwar sentiment and Flavin would write about the underlying irony of his sculptures, noting the difference between the commonplace materials he used and the luminous effects they yielded, Oldenburg would unite these ironic and ­irenic qualities in the first monument he was able to materially realize: his Placid Civic Monument (fig. 56).24 Created on October 1, 1967, the work was basically an empty grave that the artist produced by hiring two union gravediggers (who received the standard rate of $50/hour) to excavate a 6 × 6 × 3 foot hole in the ground behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park and then, after taking a lunch break, refill the hole 124

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Claes Oldenburg, Placid Civic Monument, 1967. One hundred eight cubic feet of Central Park surface was excavated and reinserted northwest of Cleopatra’s Needle and behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Work made for the exhibition Sculpture in Environment, October 1–­31, 1967. Exhibition sponsored by NYC Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs Showcase Festival. Piece no longer extant.

Fig. 56.

they had just dug. The rectangular depression in the ground can be seen as a negative pendant to the Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway, expanding on the latter’s allusions to the cenotaph as antiwar statement. Oldenburg in fact described his grave as “a perfect (anti)war monument, like saying no more,” aligning the work’s disavowal of any sort of material permanence with its irenic message.25 The Placid Civic Monument was created as part of Sculpture in Environment, a citywide exhibition of large-­scale sculpture in public places, in which, as curator Irving Sandler wrote in his catalog essay, artists were invited to explore “installing monumental art in existing city settings” as a way to “deal with the surrounding space as a component.” While Sandler identified “a desire for monumentality” as motivating the rise of New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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works of enormous size, such as Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, which was sited in front of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue as part of the Sculpture in Environment project, among the twenty-­four participating artists only Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument made this appeal to monumentality explicit in its title, albeit reevaluating the concept with a work of striking modesty and radical ephemerality, which according to the artist provided a “nice contrast . . . to the pomposity that ‘civic’ sculpture always generates.”26 Oldenburg described the work as an “environmental sculpture” that transposed the conventional historical time posited by monuments into the cyclic rhythms of nature. “Down into Earth’s time,” he added, “like a tree.” Realigning the monument’s conventional vertical axis to a level, horizontal plane, Oldenburg’s work seemed to point not to celestial, sacred realms but to mundane, earthy events. It was, according to the artist, “involved with its whole surroundings—­baseball games, lovers, squirrels, worms, a helicopter passing overhead . . . and all related objects, persons and events—­past, present and future.”27 This temporal and spatial expansiveness, as well as the artist’s desire to evoke the anxieties surrounding war, informed what he claimed to have been his original idea for his contribution to the Sculpture in Environment series: “programming the city’s air raid sirens to go off at different times of the day instead of at noon,” which, he noted, he ultimately decided against because it would be “too unsettling.”28 While an open grave is for many people an unsettling sight, its rather short-­lived existence in Oldenburg’s monument can be interpreted as dramatizing the way that the horror of warfare typically fades from memory for those on the home front (something, one might argue, that would have been countered by the random air raid sirens that Oldenburg initially considered). The Placid Civic Monument’s implicit invisibility and ephemerality appeared to literally invert the fundamental characteristics of the form. Like Newman, who cited the Cleopatra’s Needle obelisk in Central Park as an influence on his Broken Obelisk, Oldenburg drew inspiration from the Egyptian monolith, which he recalled playing nearby as a child, and selected the site for his hole only a few hundred feet from the obelisk. In his related studio notes for the project he wrote that the grave could be seen as a means of “reburying the needle.” 29 The artist also stated that his “first idea” for the hole was to inter a cache of his drawings of “ ‘impossible’ monuments in a capsule for later times when they would become possible.” 30 Such preservationalist fantasies point to the fundamental monumentalism of Oldenburg’s “hole,” at once serving to safeguard artifacts for future rediscovery as well as what might be called its antimonumentalism, sending to oblivion outdated cultural forms whose accompanying values of heroism and conservatism were considered socially pernicious. The artist compared the process of creating monumental forms and then deciding where they would be placed to the way tombstones were “made before the purpose 126

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is assigned.”31 Indeed, because of the ostensible impossibility of many of his proposals these drawings can be considered part of a tradition of visionary architecture that has often served utopian purposes. This political facet of Oldenburg’s proposed monuments was recognized by Herbert Marcuse in a short statement about the artist that appeared in groovy all-­caps letters in the Yale Architectural School journal Perspecta in 1969. The philosopher stated: If you could really envisage a situation where at the end of Park Avenue there would be a huge good humor ice cream bar and in the middle of Times Square a huge banana, I would say—­and I think safely say—­this society has come to an end. Because then people can not take anything serious, neither their president, nor the cabinet, nor the corporation executives. Marcuse went on to imagine the possible “bloodless” revolution augured by the good humor of Oldenburg’s monuments, albeit one that most likely would be chronologically impossible, since the “radical change in order to get it built,” presupposes the sort of society that would desire such a monument.32 Building on Marcuse’s analysis, one might argue that the Placid Civic Monument is at once a model for a new social order and a memorial to the society it sought to replace, presenting a vision of the monument that would eschew the priapic, heroic rhetoric associated with military funerary architecture. By making a monument that was ephemeral and invisible, Oldenburg saw his monuments as “a celebration of their obsolescence and irrelevance, of their passing into history.”33 In its ironically morbid and momentary portrayal of the traditional monument’s obsolescence, Oldenburg’s “hole” was a key example of a much broader reassessment of the form that was assessed in a small exhibition that took place seven months earlier at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in midtown Manhattan titled Monuments, Tombstones, and Trophies. Featuring the work of over forty artists including Oldenburg (who submitted drawings related to his monument to dead war heroes), Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse, Mark di Suvero, and Robert Smithson, the show examined the rise of “portable, temporary and disposable” examples of three-­dimensional art that responded to “the expanded space that man now occupies.”34 This interpretation of the new monumentality as a response to the changing modern environment was echoed in the critic Ada Louise Huxtable’s review of the show in which she wrote that the exhibition addressed “the legitimacy or viability of monuments” during “an age of moral uncertainty, or strange twists of behavior and judgment, of hope, cynicism and despair, or horrible destructive potential and new cosmic frontiers.” According to Huxtable, because “there is no longer the cultural absolutes, the emotional innocence, the intellectual faith and naiveté that legitimizes the kind of monument that correctly expressed New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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that faith and naiveté in an earlier time . . . the old yardsticks for men or monuments simply do not apply.”35 Despite the fact that the traditional monument seemed helplessly outdated and ill-­equipped to convey its message of memorialization in a modern society that was beginning to question and reject some of the inherited verities of the past (including, crucially, the humanistic tradition that established the importance of the past and its representation across time), numerous artists began to imagine alternate ways of engaging with the form, creating anti-­or countermonuments that entailed a radically different temporal dimension than their prototypes yet exhibited a fundamental engagement with time nonetheless. While certain artists would avoid the term, wary, perhaps, of its traditional associations that could inhibit the sort of immediate encounter with the work valued by so many artists and critics of the period, even when the monument was presented as a subject of criticism it still served as a crucial standard of value. In a frequently cited response to a question by Robert Morris concerning the scale of his six-­foot steel cube Die, Tony Smith declared that he was making neither object nor monument, thus implying the sort of uncategorical aesthetic experience championed by minimalists like Donald Judd (whose work will be addressed more fully in the following chapter).36 Even as many artists like Flavin and Oldenburg created works that were either nominally monuments or exhibited monumental characteristics, many commentators interrogated what they saw as the rise of the new monumentalism, however ironic or antimonumental it might seem, often questioning the contemporary relevance of the concept. For instance, Dan Graham, reviewing three shows in 1967 that contained “proposals for outsized, outside work of public context,” stated, “It is difficult to comprehend why so many artists seem interested in monuments. They refer to an older, largely discarded notion of man’s relationship to ‘Nature,’ ” in which, he notes “man’s supposed ‘transcendental nature’ ” is imposed “onto the environment.”37 The monument, for Graham, serves as the humanistic form par excellence in its capacity to bring human events into a natural scale, thus investing them with a sense of universality and timelessness. Graham’s comments were likely informed by structuralist and cybernetic ideas circulating at the time that in many ways reversed the humanistic ideal that imagined a natural state of humanity and instead argued that humans were essentially constructed out of their environment, thus making any sort of transcendental understanding of nature impossible (and suggesting one reason for the heightened attention to the environmental aspects of perception—­as in the rising interest in phenomenology and gestalt psychology—­that were becoming increasingly popular among many artists and thinkers). Graham in some regards answered his question regarding the revival of monumentalism in 1960s sculpture in a long, ultimately unpublished essay he was commissioned

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to write for the Monuments, Tombstones, and Trophies exhibition. In it he tracked the history of the monument from its neolithic and ancient origins as cairns and ziggurats to modern instances like Tatlin’s monument to the Third International and Kurt ­Schwitters’s project for a monument to humanity. He also gave more recent examples like the primary structures of Flavin and Andre and the pop fantasies of Oldenburg. According to Graham, Andre’s Lever, a work consisting of 137 firebricks arranged side by side in a straight line across the gallery floor, which was first shown in the Primary Structures exhibition, could be seen to be “ironically ‘leveling’ Brancus’s [sic] (and by extension all other) monuments’ connotations.” Yet, Graham goes on to state that “Andre in much of his work retains other ‘qualities’ of the monumental: salience, outsized scale, publicness and inutility.”38 Andre’s floor pieces, like the “mock monumental” works of Oldenburg and the “temporary or semi-­permanent monuments” of Flavin, seemed to reject the monument’s associations of timeless perseverance through their use of replaceable, interchangeable materials (such as bricks and fluorescent lights) and the temporary installations.39 While traditional monuments presented a model of temporal continuity and stability accommodating the progressive actions of humans against the ever-­advancing forces of time and decay (and, as Graham argued, sustain a “largely discarded” humanist vision of man’s relationship to the world), the new monuments of artists like Andre, Oldenburg, and Flavin seemed to posit a radically altered relationship to nature and time. In a revised version of the essay that was dedicated to Oldenburg’s monuments and published in Artforum in 1968, Graham explicated this crucial difference. “The traditional monument,” he wrote, “as distinguished from all other things that are present, has been meant to endure forever. However, Oldenburg has altered this in proposals for temporary or semi-­permanent monuments, which, rather than attempting to ‘withstand’ or ‘make their mark’ on Nature, are temporal through their contingent interrelationship with a specific environment.”40 Instead of imposing an anthropocentric temporality on the environment, these works dramatized the effects of the environment on human acts, sometimes even presenting what appeared to be an environment totally evacuated of human agency. These were in many ways antimonuments, but they were also antihumanist monuments, objects that, like their more conventional predecessors, articulated a vision of human actors in space and time (or perhaps sought to celebrate the expiration of humanist ­values through irony and parody and proclaim the arrival of a new model of subjectivity through their rhetoric of ephemerality). Unlike traditional monuments, which used scale and permanence to expand their reach across space and time, the ideal space and time of the new monuments was largely “here” and “now.”

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MONUMENTS IN FORMATION Among the numerous reassessments of the monument that took place in the mid-­1960s, few if any were as expansive or for that matter as sensitive to the temporal aspects of the form than Robert Smithson’s 1966 essay “Entropy and the New Monuments.” In it Smithson diagnosed what he called “a new monumentality” in the work of a group of young artists associated with the minimalist movement, including Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris. While recognizing how the works’ simple, geometric forms, often rendered in modern industrial materials like aluminum and Plexiglas, revealed an affinity to “architectural concepts found in science-­fiction,” Smithson described how these works “bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age,” indicating their rejection of classical humanist ideals for a posthumanist vision that signaled either a primordial past or apocalyptic future (and thus suggesting a surprising correspondence between the detrital monumentalism of the earlier generation of expressionistic sculptors such as Roszak and Ferber with the cool, new monuments of minimalists like Flavin and Judd). Indeed, like the works of Roszak and Ferber that exhibited a simulated ruination that summoned the prehistoric as much as the science-­fictional future, these new monuments exhibited a Janus-­faced temporality, imparting a “sense of extreme past and future” where, according to Smithson, “the ‘cave-­man’ and the ‘space-­man’ ” seem to coinhabit on the same temporal plane. Referring not to the past (“the Golden Age”) but to an uncannily prehistorical future, the new monuments, according to the central thesis of Smithson’s essay, present “a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which,” he helpfully—­if somewhat chillingly—­notes, “extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-­encompassing sameness.” Because of their elimination of organic metaphors of decay and evolution (which one might argue were essential to traditional sculptural methods like carving and modeling that were subtractive and additive) these new monuments presented a decidedly nonhuman and, as Smithson repeatedly asserted, “crystalline” model of time. While works like Roszak’s Spectre of Kitty Hawk imagined a postapocalyptic future through the often mangled and primordial forms produced by the welding torch, the new works, with their sleek surfaces and geometric regularity, presented a vision of a crystalline (as opposed to an organic) all-­consuming sameness that foreshadowed an entropic future whose eventual uniformity was inevitable no matter how violent or peaceful the ensuing years. Unlike traditional monuments that sought to preserve the memory of historical events or actors into the future through their material permanence and imposing scale, these new monuments seemed to eschew any commemorative function, or for that mat130

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ter any referential significance or even a commitment to perpetuity. Using materials and methods associated more with industrial design than architectural ornament and scaled to the size of a gallery rather than a public square, these new monuments registered a temporal paradox: “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments,” Smithson wrote, “the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.”41 Smithson’s gnomic analysis of the new monuments’ strange historical amnesia, ­especially toward the future, is arguably one of the most opaque statements within an admittedly dense and occasionally willfully perplexing text. What exactly does it mean for a monument to cause someone to “forget the future?” How in fact can the future be forgotten? While monuments traditionally have functioned as a means of synchronizing a contemporary community’s experience of space and time onto a much broader historical continuum, typically through the remembrance of past events that in turn safeguards their memory into a projected future, the new, entropic monuments Smithson described seem to make such historical consciousness and temporal continuity impossible by defying both the memorial and preservationist functions of the form.42 Smithson expanded on his conception of an entropic, nondurational (and arguably antihumanist) monumentality in an interview from 1968, asserting the possibility of what he calls the “a-­temporal monument.” Such monuments, according to the artist, “would take you into the area of mathematics and geometry. You really wouldn’t be involved with anything that would resemble a traditional monument. We’re more involved with forgetting than with remembering in some of our new works, and I do think a lot of artists are interested in time or the absence of time.”43 Drawing on the understanding of minimalism’s willful rejection of traditional materials and conventional sculptural forms (as affirmed in Judd’s essay “Specific Objects”) as well as the phenomenological approach to the new sculpture that prioritized the moment-­to-­moment experience of an embodied viewer in the space surrounding the work (most clearly articulated in Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture”), Smithson emphasized these works’ sense of ahistorical immanence, the way, as he put it, they “are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries” like traditional monuments. In this regard, their capacity to cause viewers to “forget the future” by emphasizing the duration of immediate perception, might be understood as constitutive of their larger ahistoricity where, according to Smithson, “both past and future are placed into an objective present.”44 In other words, as a viewer is immersed in the sensuous immediacy and unconcealed materiality of the apparently nonreferential works of artists like Judd and Morris, the significance of past references or future significance is diminished, yielding an aesthetic experience that foregrounds the “objective present” and destroys notions of chronological, linear time.

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Dan Flavin, “monument” for V. Tatlin, 1966. Cool white fluorescent light, height 10 ft. (305 cm).

Fig. 57.

Yet Smithson’s emphasis on the “destruction of classical time” in works like Dan Flavin’s “monument” for V. Tatlin (fig. 57) does not mean that these new monuments did not have their own particular engagement with temporality. While, as Julian Rose has argued, the sense of “endlessness” advanced by minimalism (which was notoriously excoriated by Michael Fried in his modernist polemic of 1967, “Art and Objecthood”), aligned such works, however ironically, with the “program of the traditional monument, typically meant to endure forever,” the “new monuments” rarely made such appeals toward material permanence or mnemonic perpetuity.45 Rather, the endless experience of lived duration—­what Pamela Lee has described as a Hegelian “bad infinity” proposed by such works—­seemed to negate the sort of historical temporality associated not only with the monument but also with modernist conceptions of stylistic development and avant-­gardist aims of critique and negation.46 Indeed, the fluorescent tubes that constituted the core of Flavin’s sculptures made their relative evanescence explicit, demonstrating how these “new monuments” were, according to Smithson, “not built for the ages, but rather against the ages.” It was precisely the inevitable burning out of the fluorescent lamps in Flavin’s sculptures that granted them their monumentalism. And it seems likely that Flavin’s nominal “monuments” to Tatlin and other figures crucially inspired Smithson’s decision to designate the new entropic sculptures as monuments. Flavin, moreover, anticipated (correctly) not only the inevitable obsolescence of his then relatively novel medium of fluorescent tubes, but also, in a decidedly entropic 132

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vein that Smithson would appreciate, foresaw a moment in the future when the very electrical basis of modern lighting would no longer exist, predicting that even if “the changing standard lighting system” in the future “should support my idea within it . . . in time the whole electrical system will pass into machine history.” This projected technological oblivion paradoxically ensures a certain monumentalism of the sort of “age value” ­ascribed by Alois Riegl so that, as Flavin remarked, even when “the lamps will no longer be operative . . . it must be remembered that they once gave light.”47 Performing their energy drain with a subtle but constant hum and flicker, Flavin’s self-­proclaimed monuments produce a technologically inflected sculptural analogue for the “ultimate future” of a burned-­out universe as projected by the laws of entropy. This trajectory of entropic regression was succinctly described by the critic Barbara Rose, who in a review of an early show of Flavin’s works noted the way the sculptures invoked a complex and multi­ directional temporality whose terminal points on either spectrum were respectively being turned off or being extinguished, so that the viewer is led to “conceive of a past or a future moment when the light will be out.”48 Influenced by the precedent of Flavin’s nominal monuments as well as postwar science-­fiction writers like J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss, whose postapocalyptic and primitivist interplanetary landscapes frequently bore the traces of a prior, advanced civilization, Smithson’s conception of entropy was fundamentally predicated on a model of technological breakdown. As he stated in an interview from 1970: “All technology is matter built up into ideal structures. Science is a shack in the lava flow of ideas. It must all return to dust.”49 Indeed, according to Smithson’s essay, it was “the awareness of the ultimate collapse of both mechanical and electrical technology” that “has motivated these artists to build their monuments to or against entropy.” Smithson articulated his distinctly allegorical engagement with entropy, as well as its relation to the dynamic of breakdown, in a statement published in an article from 1969, in which he noted that “the word entropy is a mask for a lot of other issues . . . a mask that conceals a whole set of complete breakdowns and fractures.”50 These techno-­apocalyptic connotations would be made explicit in two “real world” instances of entropy that the artist cites in his essay: the vast and unprecedented electrical blackout that brought New York City and the surrounding Northeast region to a standstill on November 9, 1965, and the industrial designer Will Burtin’s display of Atomic Energy in Action, which appeared in what Smithson described as the “uncanny tomb-­like atmosphere” of the Union Carbide Building lobby on Park Avenue in Manhattan (fig. 58). Featuring a “nine-­foot vacuum-­formed blue plexiglass globe” representing an enlarged uranium atom, the display epitomized Smithson’s penchant for representing the universal force of entropy through signs of impassive and often perilous technology. “If ever there was an example of entropy in action,” he wrote, slyly parodying the New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Installation view of the exhibition The Atom in Action at the Union Carbide Corporation, New York, ca. 1961.

Fig. 58.

display’s title (and intimating the close connection between entropy and atomic energy), “this is it.” Part of a larger exhibition, which Smithson notes was called The Future, Burtin’s model presented, in a notably minimalist lexicon, a potent visualization of the bland—­and thus arguably forgettable—­future assured by the forces of modern society, which Smithson argues was already beginning to be materialized in the “cold glass boxes” like the Union Carbide Building as well as in the “sterile facades” of suburban “discount centers and cut-­rate stores” that one could find “near the superhighways surrounding the city.”51 The minimalist “new monuments,” it seemed, would increasingly resemble their (increasingly artificial) surroundings as the built environment tended toward a bland and empty entropic sameness, progressively taking on the characteristic invisibility of the public monument that Robert Musil identified in a short, witty essay from 1927 as the chief attribute of the form. For Musil the physical persistence of monuments within a public sphere renders them gradually invisible so that in time “one experiences them 134

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as a tree, as part of the scenery.”52 While Musil’s comments seem to prefigure the almost immediate process of disintegration enacted by Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument, they also suggest how the new monuments of minimalism could blend easily into the scenery of the “good design” of a modern interior with its sleek, unornamented forms.53 For Musil, this “naturalization” of traditional public monuments was due in part to their relative stability, how they lost their conspicuous novelty over time (a disadvantage that he notes becomes particularly detrimental in a modern world of eye-­catching advertising and technological spectacle). The new monuments Smithson identified would apparently avoid such a fate by reflecting the entropic future of increasing sameness. Rather than falling into ruinous obsolescence, the new monuments presented a view of a world without time where nothing goes out of fashion because everything is increasingly the same. The nexus of time and space posited by Smithson’s conception of new monuments did not position humans in relation to the past like most traditional monuments, nor did it really emphasize the phenomenological present, as was asserted by many defenders of the works’ claims for immediacy and materiality. Instead, Smithson conjectured that the environment that the new monuments related to most closely was in the future, one that ultimately would be devoid of humans. One might argue that Smithson’s conception of monumentalism was as much posthumanistic as it was antihumanistic. Smithson’s recognition of the uncanny and arguably predictive semblance of minimal art was echoed in Dan Graham’s contemporaneous analysis of suburban tract housing in his essay “Homes for America.” According to Graham, the boxy, prefabricated houses that began to pop up in American suburbs after World War II (prompted in large part to accommodate returning veterans) were material correlates for the serial, geometric forms of minimalist art. Although the essay never directly asserts this mimetic correspondence, Graham’s description of these structures’ “serial logic” and “simplified and easily duplicated techniques,” coupled with photographs the artist took while traveling from New Jersey to Manhattan that emphasize their monotonous, boxy appearance, makes such associations explicit.54 The unprecedented ephemerality of this type of architecture, the way that these homes are not “designed to ‘last for generations’ ” but instead are “designed to be thrown away” positions these structures not only within the postwar commodity culture of planned obsolescence and disposable convenience but also within the “radical devaluation” of transcendental and economic principles that Graham attributed to Flavin’s serial and ephemeral fluorescent light monuments.55 Graham went on to identify these instances of anticipated impermanence in a great deal of sculptural practices in the late 1960s and 1970s as a radical inversion of the sort of monumentality typically ascribed to sculpture (and art more generally). Because works like Flavin’s fluorescent light pieces and Andre’s rows of bricks used preexisting, ready-­made objects they could be disassembled and reconstructed multiple times, even New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Dennis Oppenheim, Decomposed MOCA, 1969. Building construction materials. Five piles of raw materials, ingredients of the building, distributed on the floor in piles equal to the artist’s body weight. Each week the museum contacts the artist by telephone. Piles of insulation, sawdust, gypsum, cement, and metal filings then adjusted according to his exact weight reported at the time of the call. Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1969.

Fig. 59.

using different, albeit similar, materials with each iteration. The industrial and oftentimes technological connotations of the materials, coupled with a sense of provisionality, imparted many of these works with the appearance of an unfinished architectural project, or, to borrow a favorite motif of Smithson’s, a construction site. These allusions to architectural deconstruction arguably found their culminating expression in the typically ephemeral and illicit interventions into preexisting buildings that Gordon Matta-­Clark began producing in the mid-­1970s. In Splitting from 1974, the artist sawed in half a wood-­frame house in Englewood, New Jersey, revealing the archi­tectural infrastructure of the building and transforming the domestic edifice into a sculptural object, or, considering its outsized scale, some sort of Stonehenge-­like monolith. This interpretation finds a degree of corroboration in a short film the artist made of the work in which (to borrow the description of one of the intertitles) “a sliver of sunlight 136

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that passed the day throughout the rooms” vividly delineated the fissure produced by Matta-­Clark’s cut.56 Because the artist typically worked on structures that were slated for demolition, Graham would describe the artist’s “cuts” as “negative ‘monuments’ ” and “instant ruins” that expressed a “profoundly pessimistic” attitude about the future that distinguished them from conventional monuments “­designed to smoothly link past to present to implied future.”57 Even more explicit in their imagination of a deconstructive architecture were the series of Gallery Decompositions (fig. 59) by Dennis Oppenheim, whom Matta-­Clark met along with Smithson while a student at Cornell University when the two artists participated in the seminal Earth Art Show in 1969. These works consist of mounds of powdered materials that were used in the immediate gallery space such as gypsum, sawdust, and metal filings, suggesting a sort of entropic distillation of the proximate architecture, or conversely the raw materials necessary to reconstruct the space. ­Oppenheim’s Decompositions in many ways epitomized the increasing attention to the durational experience of sculpture, literalizing the phenomenological engagement often ascribed to the experience of a body moving around a minimalist work and transferring it into a distinctly nonhuman and materialist (one might even say geological or mineralogical) temporal register. Rather than the viewer’s body, the work itself would exhibit a radical contingency in both time and space. In such works, the immediate time of a viewer’s perception is set against the typically contingent arrangements—­and in some instances phase states—­of the sculptural materials, imparting the works with a sense of precarious futurity even as their identity as art (declared in their presence in the timeless space of the gallery) signaled a much longer durational existence. This unsynchronized convergence of the immediacy of lived time and the slow and steady pace of material time was concisely expressed by Andre, who declared that his works existed “in a constant state of change” without ever “reaching an ideal state. . . . As people walk on them, as the steel rusts, as the brick crumbles, as the materials weather, the work becomes its own record of everything that’s happened to it.”58 Again it is worth noting how many of the previous generation of sculptors had already explored the dynamics of material decay and embodied presence so that for instance critics noted how David Smith’s “weather-­beaten” works, made from “old and rusty materials” seem to “ask for exposure to weather and the forces of nature” and, as another commentator imagined, when placed outdoors, would “become rusty and gradually return to the soil.”59 Highlighting this temporal contingency, Graham punningly described works by artists like Judd, Andre, and Richard Serra that emphasized process over product as examples of “in-­formation,” at once signaling the emergent conceptualism and the embattled formalism of the late 1960s, and perhaps suggesting a latent kineticism that motivated the ostensibly stoic and austere sculpture of the decade.60 The categorically New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Richard Serra, Equal (Corner Prop Piece), 1969–­70. Lead antinomy, 48 × 48 ×¾ in. (122 × 122 × 2 cm), plate; length 84¾ in. (210 cm) × diameter 4¾ in. (11 cm), pole. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gilman Foundation Fund. (728.1976.a–­b)

Fig. 60.

kinetic sculptures of artists like Les Lye and George Rickey conjured up the utopian promise of perpetual motion machines and invited a dynamic mode of perception, but works like Andre’s seemed to hardly register the presence of the human agents that walked over them, suggesting the sort of slow and gradual entropic breakdown that Smithson anticipated in his art and writings. Like Graham, the artist Mel Bochner discerned “a faint pessimism” in such process-­oriented works with their simulated signs of demolition and reconstruction. In his review of a small exhibition titled Art in Process that took place at the Finch College Gallery in New York in 1966, which featured works by Judd, Flavin, LeWitt, and Morris, Bochner stated that these artists “all avoid the false utopianism which is implicit in much work being done today. Their art makes no projection to a glorious future.”61 These pessimistic connotations were vividly staged in the series of works Richard Serra began creating around 1969 in which large metal and lead components were joined and balanced using only their weight and the force of gravity (fig. 60). Unlike the traditional priapic verticality of sculpture that appeared to defy the force of gravity (again the 138

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classical statue offering a paradigmatic instance), Serra’s group of so-­called prop pieces allow natural forces like gravity to undo—­or threaten to undo—­established forms, often to great dramatic effect. According to the critic Max Kozloff, because “these works cannot even be moved without suffering a basic and perhaps irrevocable shift in the way they look,” they exhibited a “pathetic transience” and “disdain for permanence.”62 The staged provisionality of Serra’s works indicated a prior and future existence to the work’s rough and patently industrial materials, a sort of pre-­and posthistorical condition as mute things that only human action—­and notably humans working in tandem—­could formulate and inform.63 The critic Elizabeth Baker recognized these works’ sense of impending catastrophe, describing their “near-­lethal undependability” and implying “a history of near disasters behind them.”64 If, as Nicolas Calas noted in an overview of recent sculptural practices in 1970, “man’s greatest achievements were brought about by defying gravity,” works like Serra’s seemed to allegorize the perilous state of human ingenuity.65 One could say that if that the smooth polished surfaces of Judd’s sculpture presented a vision of materials that would never show signs of deterioration, Serra’s sculpture staged the imminent threat of corrosion and collapse that all material objects face. In a sense both the idealized timelessness of Judd’s space-­age objects and the ­gritty ­ uman materialism of Serra’s works are two sides of the same coin, defiantly dramatizing h industry on the verge of breakdown. For Baker the works’ assertion of precarious temporariness—­and lethal menace—­ invested them with what she described as a “tantalizing pseudo-­monumentality.”66 The critic’s recognition of the minatory monumentality of Serra’s art paralleled the broader reassessment and reengagement with the form in the 1960s, which brought a newfound sensitivity to the way that works of art mark time, not only as indexes of a past but also as a means to accentuate the immediate present of a viewer’s experience and, perhaps most inventively, as ways to imagine a yet-­to-­be-­realized future. While it could be ­argued that all works of art (or objects designated as works of art) exhibit a crucial degree of orientation toward the future—­especially those that end up in museums, which can be seen to function as grand time capsules of sorts—­what distinguished the new monuments of the 1960s was the vision of the future they projected: one of increased entropy, ephemerality, and technological breakdown.

THE NEW, NEW SENSE OF FATE No artist explored the futurological implications of entropic breakdown more extensively than Smithson. As Jennifer Roberts has argued in her groundbreaking study of the artist’s engagement with history and historical time, Smithson’s interest in entropy was fundamentally future-­oriented and, considering his status as a paragon of postmodernNew Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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ism, surprisingly teleological. According to Roberts, Smithson looked forward—­“rather overeagerly,” she adds—­to “an entropic endtime,” one that was prefigured in what the artist described in his essay on “The New Monuments” as the unexplainable “cosmic joy” that “swept over all the darkened cities” during the 1965 blackout.67 Yet if Smithson’s attitude toward entropy seemed remarkably indifferent if not sanguine, his understanding of its teleological implications was rather conventional. In fact, what Roberts views as the artist’s “profoundly deterministic” understanding of entropy that “naturalizes the concept of a predetermined, eschatological history” can be found even more stalwartly expressed in what was the most cogent and popular treatise on the concept: Norbert Wiener’s 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings (revised in 1954 with the subtitle Cybernetics and Society), which Smithson owned, cited in his published essays, and certainly drew on in his own formulations of entropy. Indeed, in an unpublished draft of an essay titled “Interstellar Flit,” which contains passages that appeared in his “entropy” essay, Smithson directly associated the “chilly blue interior of a model nuclear reactor” with “Norbert Wiener’s ruminations in his book The Human Use of Human Beings.”68 For Wiener, the concept of entropy was fundamental to his larger interest in analyzing natural and man-­made systems, a project he would define by the neologism, cybernetics. As the author notes in his earlier and much more technical treatise, Cybernetics (1948), this new field was primarily developed as a means of prediction.69 Drawing on the recently developed technology of radar, which could track the flight of bombers during World War II, Wiener devised a series of calculations that could determine the future positions of the dual trajectories of the oncoming jets and the antiaircraft missiles aimed at them by accounting for the ways that a complex entity (like a bomber or a missile) can respond to changes in its environment through self-­regulating dynamics of feedback. (The etymological origins of cybernetics come from the Greek κυβερνήτης meaning “steersman.”)70 Entropy, like the universal force of gravity, played a crucial role in Wiener’s cybernetics as it provided a constant, universal force against which such variable feedback systems could function by means of resistance. It was not long before Wiener recognized how an array of biological and social systems could be seen as “precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback.”71 Wiener’s humanistic vision of cybernetics as outlined in The Human Use of Human Beings presents a tragic, Promethean world in which “it seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.”72 As such it differed greatly from Smithson’s postmodern, if not entirely posthumanist, take on the inevitable trajectory of all things. Yet despite these differences in outlook, both of them conceded the scientific, analytic rigor that the concept of entropy brought to questions concerning the fate of mankind that have occupied theologians and philosophers for ages. Because, as Wiener succinctly 140

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put it, entropy exhibited a “tendency . . . to move from the least to the most probable state,” the force could be seen as a material—­and literally universal—­demonstration of fateful inevitability. Moreover, both Smithson and Wiener recognized that entropy in the modern era (and as it was formulated in the field of cybernetics) is fundamentally a function of information expansion and technological progress. While Wiener sought to assuage his readers, reminding them that there was time for humankind to alter its profligate ways and still unfathomable time left before the universe’s ultimate extinction, one senses that Smithson discerned signs—­taken from both the everyday world and examples of contemporary artistic practice—­pointing to the “all-­encompassing sameness” of a not-­so-­distant entropic future to come. The concept of entropy allowed Smithson to posit a model of “inorganic time” that was inspired by such nonhumanistic disciplines as mathematics and geometry, thus investing a degree of scientific objectivity and statistical regularity into eschatological and teleological paradigms that the previous generation of artists like Newman and Smith addressed in terms of prophecy and fetishism. Entropy, one might say, presented a nonhuman temporal perspective, an Archimedean vision of time without (which is to say before and after) human actors. What one might call the inherently antihumanist perspective of entropy explains in part why Smithson did not specifically discuss if the looming universal uniformity would have societal or political implications, let alone if they would be positive or negative. As the fateful telos of entropy renders all political ventures inconsequential, it arguably invites a sense of political resignation if not ­nihilism. But one could argue it was precisely the new monuments’ capacity to project a vision of the future in which human agency no longer mattered—­in which, perhaps, humans no longer existed—­that endowed the works Smithson designed as “new monuments” with the threatening and pessimistic connotations that were frequently identified by their earliest critics. Attuned to their physical existence and persistence within an environment what Claude that was entropically propelling toward regimented homogenization—­ Lévi-­Strauss called a “monoculture” in his 1955 memoir Tristes Tropiques—­the new monuments of the 1960s seemed to commemorate a future that would gradually become unrecognizable because of its omnipresent uniformity. At that moment of entropic realization, the new monuments will have caught up to the undifferentiated world they have forecasted, marking time through their mimetic correspondence to their environment. Smithson found a degree of material corroboration of his thesis regarding the entropic tendency in recent art the following year during a trip to his hometown, Passaic, New Jersey. Invoking the dry, almost clinical tone of J. G. Ballard’s science-­fiction novels in which natural disasters such as floods and droughts (which may or may not have been spurred by human actions) lead to a ruinous—­and occasionally crystallized—­landscape, and expanding on the thesis of his earlier meditation on monumentality, Smithson’s New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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essay, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” considered the encroaching entropic sameness of postwar suburbia and its industrial outskirts through the description of a series of ready-­made “monuments”—­including a steel bridge, a pumping derrick, and a small sandbox in a playground—­that he documented in six square, black-­and-­white photographs taken with his instamatic camera. The decidedly unpicturesque “unitary chaos” of these designated monuments were, like the new monuments of Judd and Flavin that Smithson celebrated in the previous essay, auguries of a new temporal dispensation. The “monuments of Passaic” were objects whose banal unsightliness seemed to prophesy the future sameness that would cover the Earth and point to the ultimate extinction of the human race. (Even the city’s name, Passaic, seemed to echo the nomenclature for prehistorical periods like the Jurassic.) Moreover, like the entropic monuments of Judd and Flavin, these incidental—­if not “instamatic”—­monuments seemed to reject the conventional dynamic of dereliction in which an entity bears the traces of time’s passage through its material deterioration. These were objects that did not summon an idealized state of originary perfection from which a picturesque ruination might transpire. They could not fall into ruination because there was no place to fall from or to. As Jean-­Paul Sartre wrote of the elevated railways that he saw during a trip to Chicago in 1945, such urban structures “are quite simply there because there hasn’t been time to pull them down; they are indication of work still to be done.” That is why, according to the French philosopher, American cities “are not built to grow old” and do not manifest themselves as they do in Europe, “in monuments, but in survivals.”73 For Smithson, his “suburban odyssey” to Passaic was a form of time travel, providing a glimpse into a “hereafter,” a “clumsy eternity” in which questions of time became less significant since there would be nothing to demarcate space or time in the increasingly entropic future.74 Instead of the “green forests and high mountains” that characterize representations of the American landscape (as depicted in Samuel Morse’s nineteenth-­century Allegorical Landscape, which was illustrated on the first page of Smithson’s essay), the unsightly parking lots and industrial wastelands of Passaic allegorize a future world that would be “wrapped in blandness.” Moreover, this entropic future would be irreversible, an idea perhaps symbolized in the “one-­way ticket” to Passaic the artist purchases at the start of his journey and more expansively allegorized in his discussion of the final monument he encounters: a sandbox in a playground. For Smithson, the sandbox becomes a “model desert” that “suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans” as well as “an open grave—­a grave that children could cheerfully play in.”75 Balancing the darkly ludic image of children playing with a symbol of the ultimate end of the universe (as well as resonating with Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument, which the artist created on October 1, 1967, the day after Smithson made his odyssey to 142

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Passaic according to the essay), Smithson goes on to present this “sandbox monument” as proof of “the irreversibility of eternity,” presenting an image of the box filled with two halves of black and white sand. The artist then imagines a child running “hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-­clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.”76 Entropy offered Smithson a model of how the nonhuman world could be temporalized through the inevitable and irreversible dispersion of energy. Yet the image of a child disrupting the ordered sand reiterates the artist’s repeated attention to the ways that human inter­ vention paradoxically expedited the process of entropy. Unlike Buckminster Fuller, who championed the human capacity to counteract entropy through the ordering forces of what he called “antientropy” or “negentropy” (a term he took from Wiener), Smithson asserted that he was “interested in collaborating with entropy” in his art, and aligned himself with Lévi-­Strauss’s concept of “entropology,” which the anthropologist posits as the study of how all human endeavors—­from “the discovery of fire” to “the invention of atomic and thermonuclear devices”—­lead toward the “disintegration of the original order of things” and “ever greater inertia which one day will be final.”77 This collaboration typically entailed linking his own ostensibly sculptural practices with natural, nonhuman dynamics in which the timeless space of the gallery confronted the ever-­ changing and inevitable entropic state of the universe. Monuments have traditionally been associated with a distinctly public mode of address that appeals to the preservation of collective memory and physical space. But Smithson created new models of sculptural monumentality in which questions of time and space oscillate in continual contingency.

REVERSED RUINS Passaic, and in particular Smithson’s literary and photographic representation of the city, posed a modern iteration—­and material actualization—­of the sort of allegorical landscape he used as an illustration at the beginning of his essay. As Lytle Shaw has argued, while Smithson’s striking designation of infrastructural entities like bridges and parking lots as monuments represents “a campy misappropriation of the category of the ‘monument,’ ” these objects nonetheless offer a modicum of the forms’ traditional function to “generate reflective thought about history, temporality, and also space.”78 Indeed, Smithson’s selection of monuments seems to parody the sort of postwar “living monuments” of highways and community centers. Thus Smithson’s provocative question, “Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?,” indicates how his conception of the new monuments—­whether sculptural like Judd’s or incidental like the playground sandbox—­could invite the sort of historical speculation about the inexorable passage of New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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time and the fate of empires that travelers to Rome have pondered for generations. Yet whereas “the streets of Rome,” as Bob Dylan sang in 1971, are “filled with rubble,” presenting multiple historical epochs materially juxtaposed on one another (so that, Dylan remarks, “you could almost think that you’re seeing double”), the new sort of timeless eternity presaged by Passaic suggested not so much imbricated, anachronic historical epochs—­what Smithson described in one interview as the “junk heap of history”—­as the diminishing valence of historicity and epochal periodization for a future society that would have no meaningful past of its own.79 As Caroline Jones notes, Rome is the city all roads proverbially lead to, but Passaic is the city that the New Jersey Turnpike was engineered to bypass, thus leaving the already historically minor metropolis disconnected from the future.80 According to Smithson, suburbs like Passaic “exist without a rational past and without the ‘big events’ of history.” While they may have “a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios,” most of the structures in these sorts of spaces—­factories, car lots, stores, and the sort modular housing Graham described—­instead propose “what passes for a future.”81 Indeed, by orienting itself toward the future rather than the past, “eternal” suburban cities like Passaic seemed to allegorize the collapse of any sort of punctual model of time in which past events demarcate points of origin and discontinuity. Moreover, Smithson argued, because the future that is typically presented by modern culture, whether in the optimistic promises of commodities or the pessimistic visions of science fiction, is fundamentally imaginary, multitudinous, and oftentimes contradictory, each potential vision, is as “clumsy” and “false” as the other.82 For Smithson, the real fate of the world would eliminate such variety and contradiction in the comprehensive monotony entropy assured. This is why Smithson’s friend and fellow artist Peter Hutchinson declares that minimalist art was not “about the future,” since it rejected both the “happy rationality of people like Bertrand Russell” and “the forecasts of woe of the World-­War-­III prophets.”83 Hutchinson similarly described how “the future fans out as limited possibilities, most of which have been investigated by scientific and fictional thought,” so that “one has the feeling that it has already happened, only in more than one way.” If traditional monuments reminded their publics of the inevitable passage of time (even as their magnitude and materials sought to resist such forces), the all-­consuming sameness posited by the new monuments of minimalist artists like Judd and Passaic respectively proffered an equally fateful vision of the future, albeit one in which ruination led not to the disappearance of human creations but rather their ubiquitous and inescapable presence. Smithson conceptualized this paradoxical reversal of conventional notions of time through another allegorical image he encountered during his trip to Passaic. On reading a green sign announcing a highway under construction, Smithson identified this as an example of “ruins in reverse” in which “buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built 144

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but rather rise into ruin before they are built.”84 The “ruin in reverse”—­in which a state of material conditionality tends toward completion—­replaces the conventional trajectory of “romantic ruin” in which, as Georg Simmel notes in an essay on the subject, “natural forces begin to become master over the work of man.” For Simmel the ruin’s message of “positive passivity” expresses how “human purposiveness and the working of non-­ conscious natural forces grow from their common root,” reflecting the romantic (and as Smithson might say, organic) affinity between natural and cultural dynamics of growth and decay.85 For Simmel, the ruin’s powerful effect is predicated on the way it materially dramatizes the evacuation of human agency from the natural world; for Smithson, the ruin in reverse provides a more paradoxical visualization of how human purposefulness expedites the inevitable disorganization and ultimate dedifferentiation of all things. In fact, if the ultimate point of consummation for the traditional ruin is a return to a state of unadulterated nature—­the moment, for instance, when the marble column loses all semblance of purposeful form and is mistaken for (or merely returns to) a boulder—­ Smithson’s entropically driven ruins in reverse would end in an all-­pervading—­and homogenized—­culture. Whereas traditional ruins disappear due to the relentless forces of nature, the new reversed ruins, like the new monuments, would vanish (and, as Musil might argue, become forgettable) because of their incorporation into a wholly artificial and increasingly uniform environment. What the romantic and reversed ruin share is an inexorable trajectory that ends in the object’s total disappearance, whether back into a state of nature or into an all-­ consuming entropic monotony. In the “reversed ruin,” technological and industrial progress results in a paradoxical form of ruination that is predicated not on material degradation but rather on the gradual and inevitable accretion of sameness. Like the concept of entropy, Smithson’s conception of ruination was equally future-­oriented, technologically grounded, and antihumanist. Entropy provided Smithson with a complex allegory for the inexorable collapse of human technological progress, matching it with a distinctly nonhuman mode of temporality that could predict the ultimate evacuation of human life in the universe with what appeared to be an unnerving degree of accuracy. Whereas traditional ruins were like hourglasses, gradually marking the passing of time by granular modification, the ruin in reverse operated accumulatively, progressively reaching a state of pure presence where no signs of history would be perceptible. As such Smithson’s interest in ruination paralleled his vision of entropy as a means to create, as he put it in another essay from 1967, “an array of art works that vanish as they develop.”86 Moreover, and in many ways more crucial to Smithson’s own practice as an artist, his engagement with the concept of the ruin brought his ostensibly sculptural production into the physical landscape, thus providing a crucial degree of spatial dislocation along New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Robert Smithson, A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, 1968. Painted aluminum, sand, painted wood, and Photostat of map with typed text, 125⁄8 × 105⁄8 in. (32 × 27 cm), Photostat of map; 12 × 65½ × 65½ in. (30.5 × 166.4 × 166.4 cm), Nonsite. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of Virginia Dwan. (2013.19.2.1) Fig. 61.

with the temporal disruption he had already identified in the “new monuments” of his peers. Because “ruins represent a combination of created, man-­made forms and organic nature,” as Paul Zucker wrote in his 1968 study of the phenomenon, they provide a privileged model for the new artistic engagements with the Earth.87 While these dynamics of an ever-­changing and ultimately vanishing work of art in the landscape would be most famously materialized in Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty, in which the natural dynamics of mineral deposition and liquid erosion, as well as the changing sea levels of the Great Salt Lake, continually modify the structure’s form and semblance, the artist would first explore the properties of ruination in his series of “nonsites.” Smithson made his first foray into this new model of sculptural practice in 1967 with A Nonsite, Pine ­Barrens, New Jersey (fig. 61), a work that he described as “an indoor earthwork,” indicating his burgeoning interest in the sort of landscape-­based practices that his oeuvre came to define. The Pine Barrens Nonsite presents the prototype he explored in a number of later variations: a discrete sculptural component—­the “nonsite”—­exhibited in a gallery, serves as a container for geologic samples that were collected from a location—­ “the site”—­that is referred to by supplementary documentation such as maps and photographs. Setting into motion a dynamic between the ostensibly timeless space of the gallery and the ever-­contingent world outside, the nonsite, according to Smithson, exists in a state of “constant transformation,” thus investing the work of art with a radical mutability that in many ways defied conventional modern aesthetics.88

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Frank Stella, Sidney Guberman, 1963. Metallic paint on canvas, 6 ft. 5 in. × 7 ft. 5 in. (195.6 × 226.1 cm). Private Collection.

Fig. 62.

The Pine Barrens Nonsite consists of a hexagonal array of thirty-­one trapezoidal containers each holding sand that, according to the short typewritten text below an ­accompanying Photostat map, was taken from an area in the Woodmansie Quadrangle in southern New Jersey. The precise location of the sand samples is identified by a small red dot on the map. The map’s shape, which echoes that of the sculptural containers, is based on what the text describes as “a hexagonal ‘airfield’ ” near where the samples of sand were taken. These landing strips are indicated by an asterisk-­like form in the center of the image whose six points extend to the angled corners. By orienting the shape of the map to an actual structure in the landscape, which, moreover, the artist noted in an essay from 1969, was itself built on a “pre-­existent earth mound that is at the center of a hexagonal airfield in the Pine Barrens in South New Jersey,” Smithson seems to parodically allude to the series of paintings by Frank Stella, such as Sidney Guberman (fig. 62), in which the pictorial composition on the canvas appears to be determined by shape of stretcher bars.89 For critics like Michael Fried such gestures of “deductive structure” exemplified a modernist commitment to aesthetic autonomy and self-­reflexivity. Yet Smithson’s map seems to undo such ideals by substituting an actual entity (the airfield) for the negative space that determines the structural integrity of Stella’s canvas.90

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The presence of the airfield, which was used primarily for the refueling of planes fighting fires, near the “site” of his first “nonsite,” establishes the central role that technological processes occupied in Smithson’s conception of entropic ruination. For Smithson, airplanes and airports exemplify the sorts of objects and spaces that could remain open to temporal and spatial mobility. In 1966 the artist was hired as an “artist consultant” by an architectural firm responsible for the design of the Dallas–­Fort Worth Airport. Smithson’s proposals, along with those of his fellow artists whom he invited to contribute sculpture interventions to the site, were ultimately not used, no doubt due to their ambitious defiance of norms. For instance, Smithson envisioned large-­scale outdoor works that could be viewed from above in an airborne plane or “through a telescope” in the terminal, while Carl Andre proposed the creation of a “crater formed by a one ton bomb dropped from 10,000 feet” or, as he suggested, no doubt ironically as a foil to such a military option, “an acre of blue-­bonnets,” the state flower of Texas.91 Smithson’s experience investigating the nexus between sculpture and air t­ravel crucially informed his emergent conception of the nonsite. He saw the aerial view provided by airplanes as well as the temporal condensation provided by flight as paradigmatic of the new modes of aesthetic experience he sought to bring about in his art. As he noted in his 1967 essay “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” “As the aircraft ascends into higher and higher altitudes and flies at faster speeds its meaning as an object changes—­one could even say reverses.” Smithson goes on to consider the sculptural potential of airplanes, conjecturing that in the near future such vessels “will be more crystalline in shape,” resembling “pyramidal slabs” and “flying obelisks,” presenting a far-­flung vision of Newman’s Broken Obelisk transformed into a spaceship.92 By selecting the small, hexagonal runway in the Pine Barrens, Smithson not only underscored these associations of temporal and spatial dislocation but also may have suggested the foreseeable ecological impact that he associated with ruins in reverse. The Pine Barrens airfield, located within a largely uninhabited region of the state, would have appealed to Smithson’s sustained interest in identifying landscapes that exhibited signs of human intervention and modification.93 In writings and interviews Smithson described the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey as being a “remote” area that nonetheless had crucially undergone a process “denaturalization” via human activity. This combination of remoteness and industrial dereliction would similarly inform his selection of the area near Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake for his Spiral Jetty, where, as he wrote in the accompanying essay to the work, “dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs,” giving the site “evidence of a succession of man-­made systems mired in abandoned hopes.”94 A similar fate of forsaken progress awaited the Pine Barrens. At the time that Smithson appropriated the area as the “site” to his sculptural “nonsite,” the Pine Bar148

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rens were being considered as the future location for a major international airport for supersonic jets that would serve the New York City region.95 The conservational backlash to this proposal was covered widely in the New York Times and more expansively by John McPhee, who published a long two-­part essay on the region that appeared in the New Yorker in November and December of 1967, a section of which is contained in the Smithson and Holt papers at the Archives of American Art. Whether Smithson read any of these reports or not, it seems likely that his description of the region as “denaturalized” was informed by his awareness of the small airfield’s probable modernization along with the surrounding region, a fate that was no doubt augured by the recent major construction projects of the Garden State Thruway and the New Jersey Turnpike, which were respectively completed in 1950 and 1952. The latter expressway became emblematic of the new sort of durational, boundless aesthetic experience associated with minimalism through Tony Smith’s often-­cited description of his late night drive on its yet-­to-­be-­opened and unoccupied lanes (an event mentioned in Smithson’s “Air Terminal” essay).96 By placing his sculptural nonsite in a remote and relatively pastoral area that was poised for development, Smithson set into motion the sort of accumulative, progressive ruination in which technological progress was the instrumental force behind entropic fate. All nonsites were in this regard terminal sites.

CATASTROPHIC RUINS Various figurations of the ruin appear throughout Smithson’s oeuvre, evident in later nonsites such as Lines of Wreckage in Bayonne, which contained concrete fragments taken from a section of coastal New Jersey where the US Navy had a large base during World War II and from which it would sink decommissioned ships (delineating the “wreckage” in the work’s title); his Yucatan Mirror Displacements, whose “scattered, half-­buried arrangement,” as Jennifer Roberts has argued, “summoned the dilapidated pre-­Columbian sites in the region; and the slideshow of the ramshackle Hotel Palenque that he documented during the same trip.97 Perhaps most explicit in this regard was the artist’s Partially Buried Woodshed (fig. 63), which Smithson created during a brief stint as a visiting artist at Kent State University in January 1970. Directing a tractor to pile dirt taken from a nearby construction site onto the roof of an abandoned storage building on the outskirts of campus until the central beam of the structure cracked, S ­ mithson created an instant ruin (as opposed to the “instant monuments” he described in his “Entropy” essay) that, four months after its creation, became something of an incidental cenotaph following the deaths of four Kent State students who were shot by members of the Ohio National Guard during a protest against the United States’ recent invasion of Cambodia. Following that event its broken beam served as a material allegory for New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970. Installation at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, 1982.

Fig. 63.

the students’ deaths and the way that the nation’s commitment to the war in Southeast Asia was splintering the country apart. The broken beam also served as an edifice for the anonymously spray-­painted date “May 4 1970,” bestowing the ruined woodshed with the sort of inscription characteristic of the memorial form. Indeed, the retrospective monumentalization of the Partially Buried Woodshed speaks to what Walter Benjamin describes as the close affinity between the ruin and allegory. Ruins, for Benjamin, are sites where a certain conjunction of time and space becomes visible, where, as he stated, “history has physically merged into the setting.”98 The fragments produced by this aggregation of time and space foster allegorical interpretation, allowing viewers to supplement the indeterminate voids produced by the forces of decay with ideas not inherent to the object itself. The appended political content of the Partially Buried Woodshed speaks to the ruin’s deep-­seated associations with what the art historian Nina Dubin has called “allegories of earthy transience.” By portraying the physical disintegration of human labor (and often a significant coalescence of collective labor, as in cathedrals), the ruin has served as a symbol for the rise and fall of societies and civilizations and, in particular, the 150

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anticipated fear of such societal breakdown. For instance, Dubin has argued that Hubert Robert’s depiction of ruins in prerevolutionary France accommodated viewers to a “time of contingency,” in turn fostering the advent of “a culture that understood itself to be modern by virtue of its capacity to envision its own destruction.”99 Of course, Smithson would not need to look back to the eighteenth century to find such imaginary figurations of the destruction of civilizations. The iconography of ruination and desolation was pervasive in the postwar science fiction that Smithson enthusiastically consumed and regularly cited in his writing.100 Smithson begins his “Monuments of Passaic” travelogue by recounting his purchase of Brian Aldiss’s recently published novel Earthworks at the Manhattan Port Authority. The book’s narrative takes place in a future world in which an ecological crisis, brought about by a preceding “Prodigal Age,” has made most of the Earth a barren wasteland, leading certain societies to create large machines for the manufacture of artificial soil.101 As in a great deal of postwar science fiction, the dangers of technology and the specter of war propel the narrative, indicating how Aldiss’s choice of title draws on the term’s more established definition as military fortifications as well as how its vision of a ruined Earth spoke to broader cultural anxieties about the breakdown of modern—­and notably militarized—­civilization. Because Smithson consistently formulated his literary and sculptural investigations of entropy, landscape, and the ruin in abstract and often abstruse terms, the more materialist associations of his art have often remained tacit and unrecognized—­or at least unremarked on—­by numerous art historians.102 In its frequent invocations of geological time and its decidedly posthumanist perspective that posits a world both before and after the human inhabitation, Smithson’s art seems to approach the political issues of his day that were seen to imperil the human race in terms of nature and aesthetics rather than politics. Such political and historical reticence is characteristic of the critical reception of the earth art movement, which has typically been understood in terms of its place within a genealogy of three-­dimensional artistic practices, what Carl Andre described as the trend culminating in “sculpture as place,” regarded as either an extension to the materialist presence promoted by minimalism (“a fragment of the real within the real,” as one writer put it) or a crucial iteration of an emergent “dematerialization” of the work of art that served as a critical interventions against institutions like the market and the museum.103 Yet as artists like Smithson began to work in deserted western landscapes that made rural New Jersey seem like a bustling metropolis, the associations with the threat of humankind’s extinction through technological means became increasingly apparent and constitutive of the works themselves. It would be the striking sense of desolation and solitude that far-­flung, large-­scale earthworks like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty caused in its viewers that would most often lead to such apocalyptic associations, paradoxically forging an array of meanings from what New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Michael Heizer, Rift 1, 1968. Jean Dry Lake, Nevada. No longer extant.

Fig. 64.

Lawrence Alloway described as “a cisatlantic sense of the resonantly empty.”104 Juxtaposed against these forsaken landscapes and often constructed out of the very materials of the earth itself, rendering rocks, dirt, and sand into simple geometric configurations, many of these works seemed, as one critic put it, to “resemble the mysterious monuments of vanished civilizations.”105 As is evident in the abandoned pumping derrick that was falling into ruination just a couple hundred yards from his Spiral Jetty as well as the artist’s decision to direct the route to his earthwork past the Golden Spike Monument, where transcontinental railroad route was completed, these signs of abandoned and obsolete human pursuits were crucial to Smithson’s interventions in the western American landscape. They also came to define the work of Michael Heizer, an artist who began creating large-­scale, and largely evanescent earthworks in the Nevada desert in the summer of 1968. Columbian art, Heizer has repeatedly The son of an eminent scholar of pre-­ described his practice in terms of an understanding of the artwork as archaeological ruin, stating that “the history of sculpture, as we know it, consists mostly of remains and fragments, damaged either by man or by natural phenomenon.”106 The dynamics of ruination were fundamental to Heizer’s first major series of land projects, the Nine Nevada 152

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Fig. 65.

Michael Heizer, Dissipate, 1968. Black Rock Desert, Nevada. No longer extant.

Depressions (1968), in which the artist employed a variety of tactics to impermanently mark and shallowly excavate large sections of the earth, from displacing soil with the heel of his boot to using the tire tracks of a motorcycle to create circular imprints on the flat surface of the desert. Whereas Smithson’s engagement with the landscape typi­cally invited slow, gradual forces of dilapidation and deposition, Heizer’s work frequently presented a more rapid and violent figuration of the ruin. One could say that if Smithson engaged with an entropic model of time that saw its gradual and inevitable deterioration into an all-­consuming sameness, Heizer employed a catastrophic model that privileged the dynamics as collision, cutting, and even on occasion explosion to posit an equally predictable, if decidedly ruinous, outcome. In a work like Rift (fig. 64), the first of the nine Depressions, one can discern an ­almost expressionist rendering of violent ruination. For this piece Heizer carved a jagged trench in a dry lake bed, leading one commentator to compare its “staggering zigzag crack” to “a 12 mile fault near Las Vegas” that was created by experimental explosions produced by engineers working at the nearby Atomic Research and Test Center.107 A similar jagged delineation marks Dissipate (fig. 65), a work whose title alludes to the ­tapered slope of five twelve-­foot steel troughs that the artist arranged flush on the New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Fig. 66.

Michael Heizer, Complex One, City, 1970–­present.

desert floor in a nearly herringbone pattern based on the random array of wooden matchsticks he dropped on a piece of paper. The title may also suggest the work’s ultimate disappearance due to the shifting desert sands, which would ultimately bury it. In fact, when Dissipate #8 was illustrated, as part of an eight-­page photographic survey of Heizer’s recent earth projects published in Artforum in 1969, the artist included two images of the piece, one taken immediately after its creation and the other taken a year later that registered “its disintegration” in the warped metal liners that were beginning to be filled with sand, noting in an accompanying caption that he imagined one “final photo” to be taken the following year in which the work will have totally disappeared, leaving “only the landscape.” The desiccated landscape that is such a notable feature in these pictures summons certain conventional notions of ruination, especially the mythic locales of the numerous ghost towns that lay in decay throughout the American West. Yet the artist’s originary “drawing” for the work, with its as-­yet-­unlit matches, encompasses a microcosmic intimation of catastrophic ruination since, as Heizer noted, “the original dropping drawing could catch fire at any time.” In its status of a preparatory drawing, the arrangement of matches suggests a future—­and notably infinitely repeatable—­realization of the earthwork while, as Heizer emphasizes, the unlit tips of the matches point to each iteration’s likely deterioration as well as the sketch’s possible 154

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self-­destruction. The projectile-­like “dispensing device” of the matches sets into motion an anticipatory temporality—­leading toward the disappearance of the object—­as well as a scalar expansion that generates the abstracted craters of the five “depressions,” which would in turn become part of the expansive and desolate Nevada landscape.108 References to what certain scholars have called “the Atomic west” in Heizer’s art are quite common, due not only to the proximity of many of his works to the so-­ called Nevada proving grounds where the US government, beginning in 1951, detonated ­numerous nuclear weapons to run a series of tests about their effects but also because of frequent references to “the bomb” that appear in the artist’s statements throughout his career.109 In an extensive interview from 1984, Heizer described his art as responding to “a world that’s technological and primordial simultaneously.” Choosing to use “basic materials” like earth, he said, “had to do with the idea of the insecurity of society, the frailty of the systems, the dependence on interdependence.” The artist went on to make these technologically driven catastrophic allusions explicit, stating that part of my art is based on an awareness that we live in a nuclear era. We’re probably living at the end of civilization.  .  .  . I knew I was doing something new. . . . In my case this sensibility was based on a feeling that we were coming close to the end of the world. The idea of living in a post-­nuclear age informed everything, the clock was ticking—­Vietnam had threatened everybody and it was time to get to the point.110 Indeed, as Robert Kett notes, “late sixties fixations with crisis and apocalypse ­suffuse Heizer’s biography. From naming his cat Atomic to his choice of work sites in the shadow of military and nuclear facilities.”111 The ephemerality of Heizer’s Nevada Depressions can be seen as expressions of a desire to, as he put it, “get to the point” and produce works of art for a world that seemed on the brink of destruction, and the same anxieties about the fate of the modern world motivated the artist’s subsequent ambition to create something that could withstand such apocalyptic cataclysm. This desire is essential to the artist’s magnum opus, City (fig. 66), a complex of architecturally inflected structures located 150 miles north of Las Vegas that the artist began working on in 1972 (and continues to work on today). The construction’s open courts, ziggurats, and long tapered walls punctuated by towering L-­beams stretching over a mile in length seem to combine Mayan monuments like Chichén Itzá with minimalist sculpture. At the earliest stages of planning this work Heizer wrote to his patrons, Robert and Ethel Scull, bragging that this work “would be able to survive nuclear attack.”112 In the 1984 interview, Heizer acknowledged that he was interested in the fact that his City was situated “on the edge of a nuclear test site,” designating the “front wall” of the structure he called New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Fig. 67. Michael Heizer, Art before Life, 1969. Photostat, 181⁄8 × 253⁄8 in. (46 × 64.5 cm). Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. Gift of Geoffrey Gates, Class of 1954, and Wende Gates. (2002-­411)

“Complex One” as a “blast shield” that necessitated certain “specifications for seismic conditions for the strength of the concrete.”113 More recently Heizer contrasted his City to the large sculptures Richard Serra began making in the 1970s out of Corten steel, noting that the material, which was also used for Newman’s Broken Obelisk, “will all get melted down” in the future, just as the gold from the “Incans, Olmecs, [and] Aztecs” did centuries before. “When they come out here to fuck my ‘City’ sculpture up,” Heizer brazenly stated, “they’ll realize it takes more energy to wreck it than it’s worth.”114 Heizer’s determination to create a monumental earthwork that could withstand an imagined catastrophic event in the future can be seen as a foil to the Nevada Depressions, where the almost immediate disappearance of the works registers a concern surrounding the imperiled technological society that appeared to be “coming close to the end of the world.” Such apocalyptic projections are constitutive of Heizer’s art, which, as one of his earlier critics noted, is “fundamentally about the future.”115 This future-­directed perspective crucially informed a series of works titled Art into Life in which Heizer identified images taken by a spacecraft orbiting the moon in 1969 that resembled aeri156

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al photographs of his earthworks created the year before, intimating the earthwork’s oracular capacity to prefigure as-­yet-­unseen lunar landscapes (fig. 67). By equating his transient scratches on the Earth’s surfaces with lunar craters created billions of years ago by the impact of meteors (and which have remained largely unchanged owing to the lack of atmosphere on the moon), Heizer sets into motion a dynamic of contingent and timeless space similar to the interaction of site/nonsite in Smithson’s art, replacing the idealized space of the gallery with the atmosphere-­less landscape of the moon. Heizer generates a similar scalar transformation as the one presented in the matchbook “drawing” for Dissipate #8. As certain scholars have noted, land art emerged more or less concurrently with the height of the “space race,” and works like Art into Life certainly suggest how an ­interplanetary consciousness may have informed Heizer’s imaginary conjunction of the Earth and the Moon, which Diane Waldman, in an early assessment of the artist’s work, called the two “most formidable objects that man has touched.”116 Yet Heizer’s oracular conjunction of the transient and typically dynamic marks he made on the surface of the Earth with lunar craters finds a closer correspondence to the strange, pseudoscientific theories of interplanetary catastrophe professed by the Russian émigré author ­Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky’s widely read books Worlds in Collision (1950) and Earth in Upheaval (1955) became influential texts for a number of artists associated with earth art, such as Peter Hutchinson, who called Earth in Upheaval “a book full of ideas for artists,” and Robert Morris, who used a passage from the book as an epigraph to his 1969 essay “Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects” in which the author asserted how his theory of catastrophism would discredit an evolutionary model of the universe, declaring that “the past of mankind, and of the animal kingdom, too, must now be viewed in the light of the experience of Hiroshima and no longer from the portholes of the Beagle.”117 Situated above a double-­page spread of four black-­and-­white photographs illustrating varieties of antiformal and laterally expansive practices by artists like Smithson, Barry Le Va, William Bollinger, and Morris himself, Velikovsky’s quotations invest the photographs of disordered distributions of matter with a sense of blasted destruction, an association that is perhaps reiterated in the reproduction of Jasper Johns’s Target and Flag with their respective associations of weapon and nation (fig. 68). Even Smithson (who Hutchinson claims read Velikovsky’s books although they are not listed in the archive of his library at the Smithsonian) would have appreciated the author’s nonbiological, antievolutionary model of the cosmos, if not his expressively anthropocentric conception of geological phenomena. It is possible to hear the influence of Velikovsky in the artist’s response to a question regarding “any elements of destruction” in his work. “The world is slowing destroying itself,” Smithson responded. “The catastrophe comes suddenly but slowly. . . . You know, one pebble moving one foot in two New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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Fig. 68.

Spread from Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 4,” Artforum 7, no. 8 (April 1969): 52–­53.

million years is enough action to keep me really excited. But some of us have to simulate upheaval, step up the action. Sometimes we have to call on Bacchus. Excess. Madness. The End of the World. Mass Carnage. Falling Empires.”118 One can sense in these remarks Smithson’s desire to differentiate his practices from the “simulated catastrophes” of Heizer, who along with Oppenheim participated in the interview. Smithson made his skepticism about the theories of catastrophism clear in the “Interstellar Flit” essay in which he mentions Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist working in the first decades of the nineteenth century who in many ways first developed the theories of catastrophism that would influence Velikovsky. Smithson writes that Cuvier “imagined a series of recurrent and terrible upheavals of the earth’s surface during which all of life of a certain period was utterly destroyed. This ‘catastrophism’ has evolved parodies out of parodies, from exploding stars to the fear of population explosion.”119 Drawing on Cuvier’s theories (which he cites numerous times in Earth in Up­heaval), Velikovsky sought to overturn what he called “the doctrine of uniformity” epitomized by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which posited a gradual and progressive model of the natural world. Instead Velikovsky argued that the Earth has experienced—­and will continue to experience—­a series of cosmic calamities such as bombardment by meteors and the planet temporarily going off its axis that could be discerned through a careful reading of world myths (in Worlds in Collision) as well as the geological record (in Earth in Upheaval.) The latter book was written, according to the author, as a response to the 158

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vehement criticism his previous studies had provoked, especially among the scientific establishment, by grounding his thesis with what he called “the testimony of stone and bone.”120 Velikovsky based his reasoning on a pseudomorphic logic (which many critics correctly regarded as startlingly naive) that interpreted jagged geologic phenomena like craters and mountains and even what he saw as the “contorted, contracted, curved” shapes of certain fossils as indexes of violent cosmological events and convulsive deaths caused by them.121 These books, with their dark, ill-­fated vision of Earth’s place in the cosmos, were remarkably popular, no doubt in part because of the way they spoke to the postwar culture’s larger anxieties about the destruction of the planet through technological means (as evinced in his assertion of the how the “light of Hiroshima” has discredited the “portholes of the Beagle”). Alfred Kazin, reviewing World in Collision in the New Yorker, understood how Velikovsky’s visions of “cataclysms, catastrophes, and global disturbances,” spoke to postwar culture’s anxieties, by “play[ing] up to our superficial pessimism and our passivity; they make it easier for us not to feel individual responsibility about anything, and they threaten us with one abstraction, total destruction.”122 Smithson echoed this line of criticism in his essay “Interstellar Flit,” writing that “the mass media manufactures ersatz disasters and crises in order to maintain an abstract dread.”123 Velikovsky’s long litanies of “ersatz disasters” grounded in the arguably abstract evidence of myth and geology transposed contemporary anxieties about a technologically motivated catastrophe into the impassive and unalterable realm of natural history. By placing these catastrophes beyond the control of man but casting them in a language that was almost biblical in its prophetic stridency, Velikovsky portrayed these events from long ago as ominous warnings to the present. He said as much in the preface to Worlds in Collision, acknowledging that it was written when “a world catastrophe [was] created by man—­of war that was fought on land, on sea, in the air.”124 His almost gothic description of the moon in Worlds in Collision as “a great unmarked cemetery flying around our earth, a reminder of what can happen to a planet,” makes such an allegorical impulse explicit.125 In his eccentric and at times comic misreading of the geological and astronomical records, Velikovsky presented a powerful—­if largely unintentional—­model of how such scientific facts and elemental matter could be fictionalized and invested with allegorical significance, particularly in terms of the contemporary existential and political crises. Consequently, it is not surprising that Velikovsky’s fantastic stories of the past and future catastrophic devastation of the Earth found a ready audience in artists who were beginning to consider the raw material of the planet as an artistic medium and, as Craig Owens argued in the 1980s, reengaged with the trope of allegory as part of a broader postmodernist dissolution of the ideals of aesthetic autonomy and medium specificity.126 Peter Hutchinson recognized this facet of the book in an essay titled New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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“The Fictionalization of the Past,” which was published in 1967. In it the artist argued that the general disregard of Velikovsky’s work was not much different from the original reception of Darwin, in that both writers offered an unsettling reconsideration of the universe that radically repositioned humanity, acknowledging its inescapable descent both back in time to protozoa and forward to its ultimate extinction (or transmutation). According to Hutchinson, because ideas about the eventual end of the universe or the human species “are threatening . . . they must be denied or fictionalized into less threat­ ening theories. If catastrophe and death can happen in the past, then they can happen in the future. This is too difficult for people who have their existence based on logical, orderly and safe situations to accept.”127 Hutchinson’s description of the fictionalized sublimation of an anticipated cata­ clysm suggests how Velikovsky’s writings—­as well as the new monumentalism and allegorized the distinctively future-­ oriented reversed ruins of postwar sculpture—­ threat of technological destruction that would apparently continue to haunt humanity until its ultimate and, according to the laws of entropy, inevitable demise.128 As Hutchin­ son suggests, because the threat of humanity’s self-­destruction was too distressing to confront directly, it had to be rendered in a manner that not only disguised the actu­ al source of the anxiety but also transferred the cause to a nonhuman entity. As such, one could argue that the literally posthumanist threat portended by the atomic bomb reversed the conventional psychoanalytic dynamic of trauma in which a disturbing past event is repressed, leading to various psychic responses that play out into the present and future, most notably perhaps the unconscious repetition of some central aspect of the very traumatic event that cannot be faced or even remembered. In an age of “Future Shock,” to borrow the title of Alvin Toffler’s popular book from 1970 on the likely “mas­ sive adaptation breakdown” brought about by the rapid rate of technological change that threatened modern civilization, the source of traumatic anxiety would not be in the repressed past but rather somewhere in imagined time ahead of the present.129 If, as Cathy Caruth notes, “the historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its forgetting that it is first experienced at all,” then Smithson’s peculiar contention that the new monuments “cause us to forget the future” registers the etiological if not an existentially therapeutic function for such works of art.130 With their gaze directed toward a future in which they might not exist, or would not be recognizable as monuments or art, the new monuments preserved the repressed memory of humanity’s end for a civilization that suffered from what Velikovsky diag­ nosed in Worlds in Collision as an acute case of amnesia in which “the memory of the cataclysms was erased, not because of lack of written traditions, but because of some

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characteristic process that later caused entire nations, together with their literate men, to read into these traditions allegories or metaphors where actually cosmic disturbances were clearly described.”131 In a book titled Mankind in Amnesia, published in 1982, at the end his career, Velikovsky claimed that he “regarded the publication of Worlds in Collision as a warning against atomic warfare. Disaster may come, not from a­ nother planetary collision, but from the handiwork of man himself, a victim of amnesia, in possession of thermonuclear weapons.”132 If, according to Velikovsky, myths allegorized actual events from the distant historical past that were too traumatic to address head on, then the new monuments in their engagement with literal space and materials sought to confront spectators with at least an intimation of the traumatic future that they alluded to. As such these works can be seen to extend the apotropaic functions of the totemistic sentinels of the previous generation of sculptures, assuaging anxieties about global catastrophe by minimizing man’s temporal and spatial presence while also figuring the desolate world promised by the forces of entropy. Intimating future breakdowns, burnouts, and ruination (even when seeking to prevent them as in the case with Heizer’s City or reimaging ruination as a process of increasing sameness like Smithson), the new monuments of the 1960s projected a vision of the future that would be marked by radical absence, whether in terms of the object itself or the human audience that could register its existence or nonexistence.

New Monuments and Reversed Ruins

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UNTITLED DSS 32 (D. JUDD)

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CHAPTER FOUR THE CREDIBILITY GAP

The invention of the atomic bomb will cause a shift in the balance between “peaceful” and “warlike” methods of exerting international pressure. And we must expect a very marked increase in the importance of “peaceful” methods. Our enemies will be even freer then to propagandize, subvert, sabotage, and exert . . . pressures upon us, and we ourselves shall be more willing to bear these affronts and ourselves to indulge in these methods—­in our eagerness to avoid at all costs the tragedy of open war; “peaceful” techniques will become more vital in times of pre-­war softening up, actual overt war, and in times of post-­war ­manipulation. — gregory

bateson ,

letter to General William Donovan,

Office of Strategic Services, August 18, 1945

I object very much when my work is said to not be political because my feelings about the social system are in there somewhere. — donald

judd ,

Flash Art, May 1987

One of the central virtues attributed to modern sculpture in the postwar years was its material actuality, the way, as Clement Greenberg put it in an essay from 1949, that it seems “to possess a denser, more literal reality than those conveyed by painting,” so that it appeared “as palpable and independent and present as the houses we live in and the furniture we use.”1 This literal, material reality could invest the work of modern sculpture with a greater sense of agency, both in terms of the various ways its manufacture and materials related to modes of production in nonartistic realms and in its vitalist associations, taking on the presence and even kineticism of living forms. In a brief statement published in the catalog for the 1959 MoMA exhibition 16 Americans, Richard Stankiewicz effectively described this prevailing perception of sculpture in the postwar years. Things may be objectively present without having the affective power that we call “presence.” . . . It seems to me that this charged quality of things is what 163

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a work must have to be sculpture and any technical means for achieving it is allowable. It is the ultimate realism, this presence, having nothing to do with resemblances to “nature.” The peculiar posture of the convincing being, the stance of being about to move, the enormity of the immovable, the tension between the separate parts of a whole are qualities that pull us to the special object like iron to a magnet. And these beings of presence that we try to make—­they are models of a never quite credible existence.2 Because Stankiewicz’s “beings of presence,” such as The Golden Bird Is Often Sad (see fig. 37), always exhibited a certain comic grotesquery, they visibly asserted their difference from the detritus of modern industry from which they were assembled. In fact, it was this tension between the physical presence that such works sought to produce and their overtly fantastical imagery that perhaps accounts for Stankiewicz’s description of its “never quite credible existence.” They were never as real as their industrial materials even as they sought to appropriate some of their affective power and transfer their cultural significance into the aesthetic realm. This tension invested a great deal of the sculpture in the 1950s with its imaginative potential and allegorical significance and provided it with a crucial means of establishing its aesthetic autonomy by distinguishing works of art from the taint of architectural ornament and “good design.” For critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, sculpture’s “objecthood” was an inherent vice of modernism’s materialist pursuits, something that needed to be successively acknowledged and transcended. For many artists and critics in the 1960s, it would become the line of contestation for three-­dimensional practices associated with minimalism and the postmodern debates that emerged out of them that questioned the possibility, let alone the virtue, of aesthetic autonomy. As artists like Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris began creating ardently nonreferential, nonimaginary, three-­dimensional objects that avoided any form of illusion or allusion, the physical actuality—­the credibility—­of their art seemed not “never quite” as Stankiewicz put it, but rather, always extremely. These were works of art that aspired to appear more real than anything that came before. And, as a corollary, as the “Art of the Real” (to use the title of an exhibition that took place at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968) became in many ways the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the decade, the sculpture of the previous generation of artists like Roszak and Ferber began to appear increasingly unreal and outdated, incredible rather than “never quite credible.”3 A great deal of welded sculpture like Stankiewicz’s already suggested a certain degree of ­antiquity and neglect through their evocation of simulated ruination. Yet the new, cool, affectless primary structures of minimalism made such signs of dereliction seem like a fateful edict, banishing them largely to oblivion. 164

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This drive toward a sense of actuality in the sculpture of the 1960s was diagnosed by Rosalind Krauss in her 1978 account of modern sculpture as a rejection of the medi­ um’s long-­standing associations with the figural representation of a self. According to Krauss, by creating objects that impart no sense of authorial presence and offer no opportunities for imaginative associations, “Judd is rejecting a notion of the individual self that supports personality, emotion and meaning as elements existing within each of us separately.” Thus what Krauss calls Judd’s “attack on the credibility of an illusionistic (or interior) model of meaning in art” entailed a new sense of publicness.4 By eschewing personal or emotional content, minimal art like Judd’s provided a more clear, and thus less ideologically manipulative, experience. The aesthetics of credibility articulated in Judd’s art and its professed public mode of address reflects a crucial transformation in the rhetoric of postwar sculptural monu­ mentalism and its continued engagement with the politics of war and peace. For artists like Stankiewicz, the tension between the mythical and fantastic imagery produced by his modification and amalgamation of ready-­made industrial parts spoke to a broader social desire to come to terms with the existential crisis augured by the bomb and stave off its threats through various acts of figuration. For artists like Judd, the fervently nonrepresentational and antipersonal lexicon of minimal art offered an alternate tactic, one that was predicated less on a faith in human capacity to generate new myths to counter and reformulate destructive societal norms and values than on a desire to strip away the illusions that made any sort of normative or hierarchical thinking dangerous. As politics—­and in particular the politics of nuclear war—­became increasingly theatri­ cal, predicated on the dynamics of détente and deterrence, art’s capacities to reveal, as Greenberg once put it, the “illusoriness of the illusions,” was regarded as an important function.5 Events like the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 epitomized this new state of affairs in which the performance of nuclear power became the front lines of military strategy. For artists like Judd, an art of credibility served as a foil to a society of political manipulation and spectacle, providing an alternate, cleared-­eye and objective mode of understanding the world. For Judd, in both in his artistic production and criticism, there was no criterion more important than credibility. Judd outlined his artistic project, what could be called his aesthetics of credibility, in his essay “Specific Objects.” In this oft-­cited text, pub­ lished in 1965, Judd argues that by forgoing two-­dimensional media such as painting and by eschewing recognizable imagery, the artist is able to create works of art uncontami­ nated by preexisting connotations that could be as real and immediate as any other object in the world. Such objects could thus avoid what he calls “the problem of illusionism” and could consequently transcend what he saw as the discredited tradition of Europe­ an culture founded on universal humanist principles (or as Judd would often describe The Credibility Gap

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these values, anthropomorphic). He writes: “Because the nature of three-­dimensions isn’t set, given beforehand, something credible can be made.”6 Drawing on the artist’s long-­standing interest in British empiricist philosophy and its precepts regarding the sensory basis of knowledge, Judd argued for an aesthetic ideal in which a work of art that renounced illusionism and familiar imagery would initially produce perceptual confusion and uncertainty that would ultimately be resolved by a viewer’s scrupulous (and perhaps skeptical) sensory engagement.7 Judd applied this aesthetics of credibility in his own art through three principal means: nonhierarchical composition (geometric and mathematically based); unconventional materials, which were frequently industrially fabricated; and the abandonment of any aesthetic borders such as podiums for his floor pieces or frames for his wall-­mounted works. For instance, in an untitled work from 1963 (fig. 69), constructed of painted plywood and Plexiglas, a square form, measuring roughly four feet on a side, is “divided diagonally to a depth half its height” (as Marianne Stockebrand has described it) and placed on the gallery floor, thus asserting its physical presence as an object within the viewer’s literal space.8 By removing the familiar signifiers of aesthetic experience, Judd sought to forge a new mode of perception that was more credible, more real even, because it was unmediated by preconceived notions of what a work of art should be. Such credibility was something that Judd not only brought to his own art but also recognized as a valuable asset in the art of others. Throughout Judd’s early criticism, which appeared primarily in the journals Arts Magazine and Art International during the early 1960s, he reserves this adjective, credibility, for the art he most admired. He called the “openness and freedom” that he discerned in Barnett Newman’s art “credible”; Robert Rauschenberg’s sculptures “credible and strong”; and perhaps most ardently, Lee Bontecou’s wall reliefs “credible and awesome.” Slightly lower on Judd’s scale of aesthetic merit is the term “convincing,” which he uses more frequently than credible but usually regarding work he deemed of lesser quality. One might say that within Judd’s critical lexicon, credible and convincing were analogous to more traditional terms of aesthetic judgment like “beautiful” and “admirable.” Judd also used the term negatively, to condemn the legacy of European modernism, which for him suggested the outdated tradition of easel painting with its accompanying principles of composition. He noted that artists working in that mode “need to present some credible alternative,” asserting in the “Specific Objects” essay that “Mondrian’s fixed platonic order is no longer credible.”9 For Judd, credibility was not simply a function of material presence or the denial of figurative associations but fundamentally a historically grounded factor, one in which different moments called for different strategies of credibility. Deliberately impersonal and unconventional, Judd’s art sought to foil humanistic notions of interpretation, expression, and composition, which, according to him, had defined artistic expression since the 166

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Donald Judd, Untitled, 1963. Light cadmium red oil on wood with purple Plexiglas, 19½ × 48½ × 48½ in. (49.5 × 123.2 × 123.2 cm). Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texwas.

Fig. 69.

Renaissance yet had become obsolete, irrelevant, and unbelievable in the post–­World War II cultural landscape. In the place of this anthropomorphic tradition, he endorsed an art of unprecedented immediacy, which encouraged scrupulous empirical judgment over historical precedent as a model of moral, political, and philosophical integrity.10 This central aspect of Judd’s art resonated with the concern surrounding humanity’s relationship to technology and in particular the anxiety and growing popular skepticism caused by the Vietnam War in the 1960s, when the so-­called credibility gap between the government’s official presentation of the war and its reception within the broader media led to a growing suspicion and distrust among many US citizens. Judd was trained as a painter and printmaker, and many of his earliest sculptures preserve a certain degree of traditional artistry, both in terms of manufacture (by the artist’s own hand) and materials (such as cadmium red oil paint, composition board, and wood). Judd attempted to diminish signs of authorial intervention within these early The Credibility Gap

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Donald Judd, Untitled, 1961. Oil on composition board mounted on wood, with inset tinned steel baking pan, 481⁄8 × 361⁄8 × 4 in. (122.2 × 91.8 × 10.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Barbara Rose. (630.1973) Fig. 70.

works through simple, geometric compositions and factureless, uniform coats of paint and to increase their material presence by eliminating bases. The artist also incorporated nontraditional objects—­such as sections of pipes, a baking pan (embedded flush into a painted vertical board of wood) (fig. 70), and, in the case of the untitled work from 1963, a rectangular plane of colored Plexiglas—­to enhance his works’ nonfigurative and nonallusive visual quality, or, in the terms of his aesthetic theory, their credibility. Unlike the previous generation of sculptors like Smith and Stankiewicz who incorporated found metal objects for their surrealist multivalence, Judd sought to defamiliarize such objects to the point of nonobjectivity. Because these materials offered a surface that required 168

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no additional alteration (as he put it, the “color is embedded in the material”), they were exemplary agents in his project to make an art of material specificity and compositional lucidity.11 As Judd became more financially successful and was able to realize his aesthetic goals more fully, he resorted to nontraditional and especially industrial materials such as aluminum and stainless steel and, to a lesser extent, polished brass and plywood as a means to downplay the handcrafted aspects of his work. In 1964 he would further forgo the authorial hand by having small industrial firms fabricate the work according to his designs.12 Judd’s art established its credibility in its material presence, made evident in his use of nontraditional art materials and rejection of recognizable imagery and conventional modes of display, yet many of the artist’s earliest critics found the works perhaps too credible in their apparent allusions to everyday objects. Writing in 1964, one reviewer described Judd’s art as “resembl[ing] storage units of an unidentifiable kind,” while another declared that the artist’s 1968 retrospective at the Whitney looked like a “science-­fiction warehouse” filled with “gleaming hardware.”13 Because of these thingly insinuations, many of Judd’s early works were subsequently given colloquial monikers by critics and dealers (and notably not the artist) such as “record cabinet,” “Kleenex box” “bleachers,” or, in the case of the untitled work from 1963, “step,” as a means of identification. Intentionally exhibited as art objects occupying the same physical space as other objects and people in the world, Judd’s works, with their nontraditional and occasionally sleek and unembellished “science fiction” materials, alluded more to automobile bodies or domestic appliances than to most sculpture of their time.14

SPECIFIC OBJECTS IN A SPECTACULAR SOCIETY These nonart and occasionally commercial connotations of Judd’s avowedly impersonal and specific objects suggest not only how his artistic project corresponded with the contemporaneous practices of artists associated with pop but also more significantly, how both strands of artistic production engaged with the already burgeoning commodity culture of the 1960s.15 The nearly simultaneous arrival of both pop and minimal sensibilities, especially to the New York art world in the early 1960s, reflects more than a coexistent engagement with the influence of mass culture, whether it was with industrial materials or advertising. Rather, both styles addressed what was seen as the increasingly spectacular, image-­ridden, and visually manipulative nature of US culture in the 1960s, a state of affairs trenchantly diagnosed by Daniel Boorstin in his 1962 book The Image; or, What Happened to the American Dream. Although probably best known for the coinage of the term “pseudo-­event” to describe an event whose primary purpose is to be seen and reported on, Boorstin’s book more generally addressed the correspondence between what The Credibility Gap

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James Rosenquist, F-­111 (detail), 1964–­65. Oil on canvas and aluminum, twenty-­three sections, 10 × 86 ft. (304.8 × 2,621.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Barbara Rose. (473.1996.a-­w)

Fig. 71.

the author saw as an unprecedented increase in visual information in postwar society and the rise of an illusionary and even deceptive component to everyday life—­not only in such an expected realm as advertising, but equally in politics, journalism, and interpersonal relationships. “Now, in the height of our powers,” wrote Boorstin, investing his language throughout the book with a tone of impending danger, “we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. . . . It is the menace of unreality. The threat that nothingness is in danger of replacing American dreams by American illusions.” In the final pages the author presents the frightening prospect of a world where the real and the false are no longer discernable. “More and more accustomed to testing reality by the image, we will find it hard to retrain ourselves so we may once again test the image by reality. . . . We must discover our illusions before we can ever realize that we have been sleepwalking.”16 This image world, in which the boundaries between the public and private spheres of experience (as well as the commercial and the political) melt away under the pressure of rampant commodification and technological mediation, is powerfully evoked in an exemplary pop work like James Rosenquist’s F-­111 from 1964–­65 (fig. 71). Employing the scale of billboards and the pictorial vocabulary of print advertising, Rosenquist’s painting, especially as it was originally installed, wrapping around the walls in the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, presents an unsettling and spatially overwhelming vision of metamorphosis in which imagery of commodities evidently taken from advertisements uncannily fuses with an immense fighter plane. In such unsettling passages as that in which a heap of Day-­Glo spaghetti transforms into what appears to be a swatch of fabric (possibly bedsheets, as sleek and monochromic as the actual aluminum panels from which the pasta materializes) and then explosively tumbles out of a mushroom cloud both doubled and sheltered by a multicolored umbrella (which is itself echoed in the reflective missile-­like dome of a hair dryer atop a small girl’s head), Rosenquist presents a surreal and particularly martial dreamscape in which modern 170

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technology and new industrial materials such as aluminum and chrome constitute both the deadliest of weapons and the most benign, if nonetheless alluring, commodities. If Rosenquist’s work addresses the blurred relationship between people and things in an overly commodified and technologically mediated world Judd sought to produce objects that could transcend this confusion, albeit in the ostensibly autonomous sphere of aesthetics. In this regard the horizontal plane of purple Plexiglas in Judd’s work from 1963 provides an illusionistic (and technologically redolent) passage similar to the morphing forms Rosenquist painted on the reflective aluminum panels. Its sensuous, mirrorlike surface stands out from the rest of the object’s matte cadmium red exterior, declaring itself as the key passage in the work and presenting the beholder with a visual conundrum: Is the vague triangular form seen on the surface of the Plexiglas the reflection of the lower triangular form, or is it a view through the translucent material into a hollow interior space exposing part of a square base that supports the uppermost triangular form? As the conventional account of Judd’s art (and minimalism more generally) has demonstrated, the answer can only be arrived at through a bodily engagement with the object, approaching and checking one’s visual sensations with one’s changing position in relation to it.17 Such perceptual skepticism is awarded with enlightenment, revealing that what one sees is in fact a reflection, a very convincing natural illusion (as opposed to artificial illusions like representational imagery), and a quite mesmerizing one—­like the ripples seen on the surface of a tree-­lined lake—­able to hold the viewer’s interest for an unexpectedly long time. It could be argued that if pop art diagnosed the symptomatic excess and confusion of commodity culture, minimal art like Judd’s sought a possible cure. Critical of traditional painting and sculpture that purported to be representations of things in the world, Judd instead sought to create “specific objects” that aspired to be nonreferential things in themselves. In a world of rampant commodification and media overload, Judd’s art furnished a space of ­perceptual credibility.18 Because these works resisted traditional modes of aesthetic appraisal, they created anxiety in many viewers who did not know how to approach such art. Situated within the actual space of the beholder rather than the idealized space of the pedestal or frame, the works addressed themselves not as aesthetic objects for optical delectation but as real physical presences that impinged on the viewer’s spatial awareness.19 Many of Judd’s critics found his work “aggressively physical,” “disconcerting,” “threatening,” and even “belligerent.”20 Judd himself acknowledged that the industrial materials he valued for their “obdurate identity” also contained “aggressive” qualities.21 Journalists often couched their reception of his works in explicitly martial metaphors. For instance, one writer noted how “the massive, four-­foot cubes” of “shining” stainless steel that Judd showed at his Whitney retrospective in 1968 “are marshaled into strictest alignment.”22

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Fig. 72. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965. Galvanized steel and red enamel, 1411⁄16 × 769⁄16 × 255⁄8 in. (37.3 × 194.6 × 64.8 cm). Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Harold D. Field Memorial Acquisition, 1966.

Another reviewer of the same show provided a colloquial designation for one of Judd’s works by referring to the protuberances of a four-­pronged work as “knuckles” (fig. 72).23

MINATORY MINIMALISM The recurring associations between Judd’s aesthetic project of credibility and the perceived aggressiveness of his work follow a pattern in the broader reception of minimal art in which the works were characterized using terms of violence and force. Anna Chave, in her groundbreaking essay “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” demonstrated the underlying and, according her argument, deeply gendered ways in which minimal art presented itself and was received as aggressive and powerful.24 These intimations of force and power often prompted specifically military associations in ­writers. For instance, reviewing the landmark Primary Structures exhibition of 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York, one of the first shows to present a representative body of minimalist art to the public, the critic for Time magazine described certain sculptures (presumably those of Ronald Bladen) as “tilt[ing] like huge destroyer smokestacks” and noted the “aggressive and sometimes playful” nature of the art in the show. One of Judd’s contemporaries, Walter De Maria, exhibited a work called Bed of Spikes in 1969 made of 153 upright eleven-­inch obelisk-­shaped spikes that were described (again in the pages of Time) as “honed to the sharpness of a Viet Cong punji stick” (fig. 73). Around the same time Melvin Edwards created a series of sculptural installations in which taut strands of barbed wire delineated space within the gallery and drew on what the artist described as “the brutalist connotations” of his chosen material, and in particular its “long history in war both as obstacle and enclosure.”25 Judd himself invoked such metaphors when 172

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Walter De Maria, Bed of Spikes, 1968–­69. Stainless steel, five sculptures total, each comprising solid, obelisk-­shaped spikes arranged in a grid array on a welded plate base, 2½ × 78½ × 419⁄16 in. (6.5 × 199.6 × 105.6 cm), plates; 10½ × 7⁄8 × 7⁄8 in. (26.8 × 2.5 × 2.5 cm), individual spikes. Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.

Fig. 73.

commenting on the spatially imposing sculpture of Lee Bontecou in a review from 1965, commending its “minatory power” and pointing out that it has to be viewed “with puzzlement and wariness, as would be any strange object, and at most seen with terror, as would be a beached mine or a well hidden in the grass.” In his “Art and Objecthood” of 1967, undoubtedly the most famous example of art criticism on minimalism, Michael Fried states that “there is a war going on between theater [his term for the kind of literal art practiced by artists like Judd] and modernist painting.” Throughout the polemical essay Fried invokes a passionately combative tone, describing the “survival” of modern painting as a “conflict” where object-­like works such as Judd’s must be “defeated.”26 Minimalist works were repeatedly described in decidedly martial terms. In a catalog essay for a show that surveyed the new minimalist aesthetic in 1969, Barbara Rose noted how many of the works emphasize “brutal qualities like power, impact, and The Credibility Gap

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Ring with Light), 1965–­66. Painted wood, fiberglass, and fluorescent light, two units, overall 24 × 14 × 97 in. (61 × 35.6 × 246.4 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. General Acquisitions Fund and a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Fig. 74.

concreteness.” She highlighted Flavin’s work for the way it seemed to “relentlessly assault the eye, but not without offering [its] own reward in return for this unsolicited attack.”27 In another foundational essay of minimalism, Annette Michelson’s catalog essay for a 1969 retrospective of the work of Robert Morris, an artist perhaps only second to Judd in embodying the minimal movement both in his passionate writings and wide-­ranging a­ rtistic practice, the author suggests how the anxieties of war infused the critical reception of minimalism. Writing about an untitled work from 1965–­66 constructed of a gray plywood circle with two bands of fluorescent light emanating from opposite sides (fig.  74), Michelson describes how Morris’s artwork energizes the space around it, arguing that such a spatially engaged artistic project exhibits a certain relevance to everyday life. She demonstrates this point by citing the “prolonged debates over the design of the table and seating arrangements which preceded the opening of the current ‘peace talks’ in Paris, as reported in the New York Times during December 1968 and January of this year.”28 A diagram of the proposed tables for the negotiations between US, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese delegates, published in the Times on December 14, 1968 (although not included in Michelson’s essay), suggests how these spatial concerns found a strikingly similar materialization to Morris’s work and the minimal aesthetic more generally (fig. 75). The underlying political and specifically war-­related 174

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Page from New York Times (December 14, 1968), p. 2, featuring illustration for “U.S. and Hanoi Delegates Debate Table Design.”

Fig. 75.

content of Morris’s work during this period is most evident in one of the artist’s earliest extant works: the series of thirteen paintings titled Crisis from 1963 (fig. 76). Here Morris used characteristically minimal tropes of formal reduction and negation of ostensible content to literally obliterate the subject of military violence. In Crisis #2, for instance, Morris roughly occluded the information given by the headline of the New York Post from Monday, ­October 22, 1962, announcing the alarmed state of affairs brought on by the Cuban missile crisis, covering the text in the same gray paint that would become the artist’s signature color for his minimal pieces a few years later.29 While it is understandable how the growing prevalence of war (and the threat of war) permeated the critical discourse of various cultural spheres with these kinds of references, many artists, including Morris and Judd, were at certain moments in their careers actively involved in the antiwar movement, suggesting a more direct, if complex, correspondence between the martial metaphors associated with minimalism and the artists’ biographies. Judd’s undeniable awareness of the issues surrounding both the The Credibility Gap

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Robert Morris, Crisis #2, 1962. Mixed media on newspaper, 181⁄8 × 245⁄8 in. (46 × 62.5 cm). Collection of the artist. Fig. 76.

Vietnam War and nuclear weapons arguably allowed the artist to channel such a­ nxieties and ideals in his work, however unintentionally. The art historian David Raskin has argued that Judd instilled his own vaguely anarchist and antiwar politics into his artistic production through the visual sensitivity that his works stimulate, encouraging viewers to engage with the world in a heightened mode of skepticism and self-­reliance.30 In the summer of 1968, while an artist in residence at the Aspen Center for Contemporary Art, Judd published a full-­page announcement in the Aspen Times calling for an end to the war in Vietnam as well as a renewed commitment to civil rights in the United States. That fall he participated in a benefit exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York to raise money for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The artist’s most explicit antiwar statement, written in 1991 in response to the US invasion of Kuwait and revealing his distrust of military power, declared that “almost no one in the United States has said that for fifty years the country has been a military state and that the ‘Cold War’ was, as it is again, a situation devised to maintain that military state.”31 Yet despite the artist’s ardent antiwar stance, it could be argued that war marked both Judd’s first experience with construction and design when, as a member of the Army Corps of Engineers between 1946 and 1947, he supervised the erection of prefabricated buildings in Korea, and his culminating artistic project, the establishment of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Using land that had earlier been occupied by 176

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Donald Judd, Untitled (100 works in mill aluminum) (detail), 1982–­86. The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

Fig. 77.

Fort D. A. Russell, a US army base with artillery sheds, an aircraft hangar, and barracks, Judd redeveloped the base into a tightly controlled, ideal setting for the display of art.32 Although Judd claimed that the site’s previous military existence could hardly be deemed an architectural (let alone an ethical) virtue, he nevertheless allowed signs of the building’s history to remain unaltered, as can be seen in the German words, directed at prisoners of war who were brought to the camp, stenciled over the exits of the artillery shed, prohibiting entry by unauthorized persons (fig. 77).33 More significant, the oftentimes nontraditional and industrial materials Judd used to forge what he saw as a more credible art, coupled with the elimination of framing devices and use of s­ erial composition strategies (evident in the multiple variations of equally sized aluminum ­boxes displayed in the Chinati artillery shed) invested the works with what many viewers considered to be threatening, aggressive, and even inhuman qualities. Judd’s pursuit of a more credible art, while ostensibly situated within the autonomous realm of aesthetics, nonetheless resonated with one of the central social and political concerns in US culture at that time. For the concept of credibility, besides being a cornerstone of Judd’s art and aesthetic theory, was closely associated not merely with the war in Vietnam but also with global nuclear war. The Credibility Gap

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THE CREDIBILITY GAP Credibility was a key word in the “new frontier” of the 1960s. In 1962 Boorstin diagnosed what he saw as the increasingly deceptive nature of everyday life in a mediated and commoditized world, a world in which, as he put it, “ ‘truth’ has been displaced by ‘believability.’ ” By the second half of the decade the discourse surrounding credibility was no longer directed merely at commodities and celebrities but also whole institutions, technology, and the fate of life on Earth.34 The central place of credibility in terms of such weighty matters was manifested in one of the definitive terms of the period. In a special issue of Newsweek from July 1967 devoted to the escalating military predicament in Vietnam and its domestic consequences, the authors invoked a common phrase to summarize the social crisis brought about by the divisive feelings the war engendered. “More than anything,” they wrote, “Vietnam has made Americans question their fundamental assumptions about themselves and their country. In the jargony shorthand of the mid-­1960s, the problem is distilled into a single, cryptic phrase: the credibility gap.”35 The phrase “credibility gap” had entered the lexicon of US politics the previous year as the nation’s increased involvement in Vietnam led many people to discern the drastic divergence between the administration’s generally optimistic assessment of the war and the usually gruesome images brought home via television and newspapers daily. While the shared nomenclature of Judd and the US media needn’t insinuate any direct causal relationship, it does imply how the artist’s work operated within the broader cultural concerns of the moment, addressing some of the most pressing national anxieties. While the credibility gap between the reality and the mediated representation of the Vietnam War produced a growing sense of mistrust and unease among many citizens, Judd’s credible art, with its aggressive connotations and rhetoric of industrial and technological objectivity, assuaged if not temporarily mended the gap felt to be pervasive in American culture at large while simultaneously (if largely unintentionally) figured the very basis of the anxiety that grounded his artistic practice of material specificity and credibility. The credibility gap of the Vietnam War was genealogically linked to earlier gaps in Cold War discourse, such as the “bomber gap” and the “missile gap” of the late 1950s, which expressed in material terms the competitive arms race between the United States and the USSR.36 These gaps found their frightening resolution in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. Following this event, US citizens confronted the staggering realization that a nuclear conflict could readily bring about not only the total destruction of the two embattled nations but, just as likely, the entire world population. Such fears were explored in films like Fail Safe and its brilliantly parodic doppelgänger Dr. Strange­ love, both from 1964, the latter coining its own gap, the “doomsday gap” that, drawing 178

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on the fearsome lexicon developed in Herman Kahn’s well-­known book On Thermonuclear War, referred to a Soviet death machine that would destroy the entire world if the USSR was attacked first. Once the United States had literalized its worst fears about nuclear war, Washington sought a foreign policy that suppressed the possibility of nuclear war by transferring the competition between the superpowers away from each other and toward arenas in which they could clash without recourse to the bomb. The United States had come as close as it ever had to the actual realization of nuclear war and in the process recognized that to engage in such a war was to engage in a no-­win operation of total annihilation. To forestall further full-­scale nuclear engagements with the Soviets, new spheres of competition were constructed in which each country could present (and more particularly perform) its credibility. Along with the “space race” and the continued, if clandestine, nuclear brinkmanship, the war in Vietnam became a crucial component in this campaign of credibility: a conventional, limited war in which the two superpowers could meet and demonstrate their power and determination without recourse to nuclear weapons. This doctrine of credibility was often couched in such theories as the domino effect, which argued that if the United States showed lack of resolve when one small country was threatened by communism, it would lose its international credibility if called on to stave off further attacks. According to this strategy, which historian Jonathan Schell calls the “unvarying dominant goal of the foreign policy of the U.S.” between 1961 and 1974, the real crisis of nuclear war could be successfully avoided only by the creation of unreal and largely symbolic crises, of which the communist threat in East Asia was the most visible and persistent example. According to Schell, “What the strategists of the Vietnam War had always most feared was not the reality of defeat but the appearance of defeat, and what they most wanted in Vietnam was not victory, but victory’s image.”37 But an unbridgeable paradox existed within this logic and found its ultimate breaking point in the Vietnam War. For to acknowledge the theoretical or even theatrical nature of such military actions would inherently invalidate their manifest rationales and in turn expose the lurking atomic unease underpinning this policy of deterrence. In fact, the widening of the credibility gap corresponded to the expansion of the nuclear arms race, a phenomenon recognized as early as 1957 by Henry Kissinger, who as study director in nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council of Foreign Relations wrote, “As the power of modern nuclear weapons grows, the threat of all-­out war loses its credibility. . . . Whatever the credibility of our threat of all-­out war, it is clear that all-­out thermonuclear war does not represent a strategic option for our allies. Thus a psychological gap is created by the conviction of our allies that they have nothing to gain from massive retaliation and by the belief of the Soviet leaders that they have nothing to fear from our threat of it.”38 The Credibility Gap

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INTRANSIGENT BARRICADES Judd’s aesthetic of credibility, founded on a faith in the undetermined and ­impersonal capacities of nontraditional and industrial materials in art making, contained an irrec­ oncilable paradox whose logic in many ways paralleled the contradictory tensions moti­ vating the credibility gap within American culture more broadly. While deliberately eschewing any form of visual illusion (in that they do not represent something beyond themselves), many of Judd’s works, through their reflective surfaces, shadowy recesses, and translucent materials, nonetheless include instances of lived or perceptual illusion produced by their factureless and perfectly tooled surfaces.39 As Richard Shiff has noted, Judd associated such perceptual or “real” optical illusions with scientific repeatability in that the artist believed each viewer would experience the same optical illusion similarly. Despite the artist’s avowed assertion of the empirical objectivity of such perceptual illu­ sions, many viewers, especially in the 1960s, found this aspect of the works both crucial and disconcerting in that it seemed to contradict Judd’s aesthetics of credibility and the objective rhetoric of his chosen materials.40 Within the nebulous reflections and shadowy spaces of Judd’s otherwise specific objects resides a forbidding doubt as to whether such objective materials (because of their frequent connotations of industrial production and technological precision) could indeed transcend the variable and unreliable realm of human action and perception and, in addition, whether such transcendence was even in the best interest of humankind. For instance, the burnished brass surfaces of an untitled “stack” from 1969 (fig. 78) puncture any sense of geometrical stability engendered by the work’s rigid rectangular structure, presenting the reflected environment as soupy, very nearly psychedelic swirls of colors and shapes. The crisply defined edges and corners of the uncompromisingly self-­evident materials offer a beholder no perceptual place to rest. Similarly, the towerlike space cumulatively formed by the stacked units, powerfully illuminated by a crimson glow produced by light passing vertically through translucent Plexiglas sheets, produces an equally compelling visual ambiguity. Because of the technical flawlessness with which this work was constructed and because of its serial regularity, the light seems to corrode the Plexiglas sheets, creating the convincing illusion that nothing encloses either the top or the bottom of the boxes. Again, as in the wedge-­shaped piece from 1963, only when a mobile beholder actively engages with the piece, that is, when the viewer bends over and then looks up to see inside the work, can the specific construction of the stacks be ascertained and can the viewer actually see that each of the brass units has Plexiglas on both the top and bottom. (In some previous iterations of stacks from the early 1960s, Judd put Plexiglas only on the bottom of each unit.)41

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Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969. Brass and colored fluorescent Plexiglas on steel brackets; ten pieces, overall 9 ft. 8½ in. × 24 in. × 27 in. (295.9 × 61 × 68.6 cm); each piece 61⁄8 × 24 × 27 in. (15.5 × 60.9 × 68.6 cm), with 6 in. (15.2 cm) spaces between. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. Fig. 78.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968. Brass, 22 × 48¼ × 36 in. (55.9 × 122.6 × 91.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson. (687.1980)

Fig. 79.

Robert Pincus-­Witten, reviewing an exhibition of Judd’s work at the Castelli ­Gallery in 1970, described the ambiguities produced by a single unit piece made out of brass (fig. 79). Noting the material’s “apparent absence of solidity—­the sense of liquidity—­it induces,” the critic enumerated the perceptual paradoxes of the work, how “there are views, for example, of the polished brass box, in which the recessed top is simply denied, appears flush with the sides. There are other views in which the sides appear translucent rather than reflective, as if one saw the floor through the side rather than reflected off it.” According to Pincus-­Witten, such effects, which he sees in formalistic terms as Judd’s attempt to reconcile “pictorial and sculptural experience,” demonstrate the artist’s “particularly coercive” engagement with the spectator, “forcing him into altered relationships with an elemental, at moments, brutalist, formal vocabulary.” Invoking the martial metaphors frequently found in writings about minimal art, Pincus-­Witten contends that Judd’s artworks can be considered “intransigent barricades” against the The Credibility Gap

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blurring of art and life epitomized by artists like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, and that the perceptual ambiguities produced by Judd’s art reveal the artist’s “deep need to protect and reinvent the integrity of the Cubist and Constructivist vernacular at the moment when the great tradition of the Cubist monolith is most particularly assailed by the decorative appeals of technological intermedia.”42 Like much of the fervently formalist criticism that was marshaled to understand the art of the 1960s (especially in the pages of Artforum), this analysis insinuates the historical pressures informing such art and its critical reception without ever addressing them head-­on. Fried stated in 1965 that such seemingly autonomous and arguably academic modernist painting as Kenneth Noland’s or Jules Olitski’s was “more desperately involved with ­aspects of its visual environment than painting has even been.” However, Pincus-­Witten’s attempt to situate Judd’s art within the modernist trajectory of flatness and autonomy (as a means to evade being “assailed” by “technological intermedia”) reveals the works’ significant (if negative) relationship with the burgeoning (and for certain artists and critics alike, threatening) postmodern landscape of technological and commercial mediation.43 If modernist painting and Judd’s minimalist objects were involved with what many commentators took to be a visual environment of technologically based spectacle, deception, and mediation, then the invocation of illusion in these works (as in the vibrating tonalities of color field paintings like Noland’s and the perceptual ambiguities of Judd’s art) figured the very world of illusion they sought to counter and simultaneously defied it through an obdurate attentiveness to the essential qualities of their chosen medium or materials.

APOCALYPTIC TECHNOLOGY Many of Judd’s best works from the 1960s exhibit this paradoxical dialectic of credible materiality and an unhinged perceptual and illusory experience. While it seems likely that Judd invoked such illusionism to heighten the viewer’s sensitivity and skepticism, within his aesthetics of credibility, with its ardent anti-­illusionism and foundational empiricism, the perceptual ambiguity consistently produced by the ostensibly impartial materials he chose suggests a certain aporia, or gap—­one that operated within the same technological anxiety that ultimately underlined the larger discourse of credibility in American culture. Judd himself never proclaimed any particular interest in technology, and after 1964, when he had his works fabricated outside of his studio, the process was less technological or even industrial than artisanal (since it was typically carried out by small, local firms like Bernstein Brothers or trained craftsmen working in a traditional workshop setting). Nonetheless, his art, with its technical precision and frequent use of unconventional materials, and its capacity to impose itself within the viewer’s physical space, led many viewers to regard it as concurrently futuristic and threatening. As 182

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the new technology that brought about the revolution in consumer culture during the postwar years began to be associated with specifically military and nuclear projects (as evinced in Rosenquist’s F-­111), a widespread fear emerged in American culture that the very technological precision and progress that kept the country safe and made peoples’ lives easier would be the same force that might ultimately destroy civilization. Such sentiments were perhaps most clearly and memorably expressed by philosopher ­Herbert Marcuse in his 1955 study Eros and Civilization, in which he described how one of the central features of “late industrial civilization” is “the fact that the destruction of life (human and animal) has progressed with the progress of civilization, that cruelty and hatred and the scientific extermination of men have increased in relation to the real possibility of the elimination of oppression.”44 The credibility gap in Judd’s art speaks to this crucial anxiety regarding the role of technology in American culture in the 1960s and in particular its utopian and destructive capacities. Producing irrational reflections and perceptual ambiguities when encountered by a mobile human subject, Judd’s art exposes the Achilles heel of technological objectivity: no matter how impersonal and objective a technology is, the human intervention necessary to enable it instigates a problematic “doubling” that cancels any possible detachment, making the object an inevitable “extension of man” (to borrow M ­ arshall ­McLuhan’s description of technology). During the 1960s, when technology seemed to be an increasingly inescapable presence in everyday life, mediating experience and even holding the fate of humankind in the balance, the question concerning humanity’s relationship to technology became especially critical. Reviewing an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969 that explored modern art’s relationship to technology, critic Max Kozloff diagnosed the growing “fear that our one-­time extensions, the machines, are becoming our present competitors; that control and responsibility are becoming too vulnerably compressed; and that increased services by our goods and systems tend more to regulate than to liberate us.”45 This fateful association between man and machinery was played out with respective horror and humor in movies like Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, in which the combination of human fallibility and technical intransigence (evident in the “fail-­safe” technology that supposedly removed the possibility of human error) lead the human species on a one-­way course to its extinction. The relationship between minimal art and this daunting technological sublime plays a central role Stanley Kubrick’s follow-­up to Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, a film whose meticulous production values and innovative special effects, which invite a particularly corporeal mode of spectatorship, led Annette Michelson to compare it to a minimalist “Primary Structure” by invoking the exhibition of the same name of two years before. Michelson described the movie’s elaborate and costly production as an enterprise analogous to “the proud marshalling of vast resources brought to bear upon the most sophisticated and The Credibility Gap

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Appearance of the monolith during solar eclipse in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM, 1968).

Fig. 80.

Fig. 81.

Missile launcher in Earth’s orbit in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM, 1968).

ambitious ventures of our culture,” such as “a new inter-­continental missile system.”46 The correlation between technological millenarianism and precisely wrought surfaces of minimal art is materialized in the mysterious black monolith that first appears in the opening scenes of the film (fig. 80). After apparently bestowing the first human beings with consciousness (and, as described in Arthur C. Clarke’s accompanying novel, staving 184

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off the inevitable extinction of mankind from an extensive drought), the technological essence of this Primary Structure is revealed when a bone, recently discovered to be a valuable weapon by the protohumans who touched the monolith, is thrown into the air. The primitive weapon memorably morphs into an astronautical ­nuclear missile carrier aimed at the Earth and thus, through this famous edit, advances the film’s narrative from the “Dawn of Man” to the opposite and equally perilous end of humankind’s e­ xistence (fig. 81).47

JUDD’S COLD WAR MONUMENTS Reconciling the apparent contradiction between Judd’s aesthetics of credibility and the illusionistic effects produced by many of his chosen materials provides a possible means of understanding the opposition between the taciturn austerity of minimalism and the increasingly turbulent social environment of the 1960s in which it was produced. But, if understood in terms of the works’ capacity to concurrently reflect and assuage the imperative issues surrounding war and technology, the apparent contradiction also provides one possible explanation for minimalism’s ascendancy as the prevailing artistic style throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Judd, who saw his art as political in terms of its ability to encourage a clearer perception and heightened skepticism in the viewer, and who repeatedly articulated an antiwar position in his public life, produced works of art that were not so much critiques of the military-­industrial complex as complex meditations on its inherent contradictions and its relation to the larger culture. And while the technical precision of Judd’s art resonated with the discourse of technological millenarianism grounded in the threat of nuclear war, the same technological anxieties found a ready materialization in the realities of Vietnam, a war in which computers and systems analysis were used to assess the most effective military strategies, leading the writers of Newsweek to describe it as “the most depersonalized war America has ever fought.”48 Supervised by statistical masterminds like Secretary of Defense Robert ­McNamara, the Vietnam War, particularly in the years of minimalism’s heyday between 1964 and 1968, was considered, as David Halberstam defined it, “a technological war, a war which could be fought antiseptically, war without death,” thus applying the same technocratic ideology of nuclear war to a limited, nonnuclear war.49 Judd’s art, described by the critic John Perreault in 1967 as containing “the implied IBM numerology and the icy, science fiction surfaces of Flash Gordon bank vaults,” provides a crucial link between the fear of technology out of control, induced in part by US nuclear policy, and the similar sense of political alienation and impotence that accompanied the country’s headlong advance into Vietnam—­what Paul Goodman in 1966 called “the psychology of being powerless.”50 In this regard, the mute surfaces that contained within them a lurking sense The Credibility Gap

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of threat spoke to both the anomie and aggression that defined much of 1960s culture in the ­United States. Considering the well-­documented tendency to marginalize violence within the ­public sphere, there is in fact no necessary contradiction between the rise of minimalism and America’s escalating involvement in Vietnam.51 One could even argue that it was because of the growing violence and uncertainty in US culture that such a hermetic, cool art found a ready audience, suggesting that if minimal art was not antiwar, it was, in its taciturn austerity, propeace. As Julia Bryan Wilson has argued, Carl Andre for one emphasized what he saw as the “stillness” and “peaceful qualities” of his art as a component of his resistance to the war.52 “Vietnam’s contribution to the pop psyche has been uncommonly small.” Such was the verdict of the writers for a special issue of Newsweek dedicated to the war, which hit the newsstands at the same time as the issue of Art­ forum dedicated to sculpture and featuring such landmark essays as Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture 3” and Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.” “Despite the vocal torment of U.S. intellectuals,” wrote the editors of Newsweek, “it sometimes seems that America is doing its best to suppress awareness of the distant war.”53 The fact that such violent connotations were carried in such mute vessels places Judd’s objects within a long tradition of aesthetic representations during times of war that sublimated violence in the name of some kind of ideological unity. Within the nexus of technology and military violence that permeated American culture in the 1960s, Judd’s work occupied a position of both resistance and reflection. The paradoxical duality in his art—­appearing simultaneously cool and confrontational—­ found a ready audience in a society engaged in a war that people increasingly distrusted and felt powerless to change. While other artists of the period produced works that explicitly evoked martial motifs, such as Claes Oldenburg’s monumental tank with a lipstick cannon (see fig. 25), De Maria’s Bed of Spikes (see fig. 73), or, more explicitly, George Segal’s Execution (1967, Vancouver Art Gallery), which was illustrated in the Newsweek special edition on Vietnam in a section about artistic responses to the war, Judd, true to his aesthetics of unmediated perception, insinuated into his art the emotional effects of such weapons rather than their visual appearance. By assertively placing the onus of perceptual experience on the viewer, Judd’s art produced a stark (and at times threatening) correlative to the uneasiness many viewers felt concerning the escalating war in Vietnam (and perhaps the larger dread of unbridled technology, manifested in most extreme terror in an “all-­out” nuclear war). Like the cenotaph built in honor of the Union dead located on the Bull Run battle­ field in Manassas, Virginia (fig. 82), which elegantly distills the ungainly realities of war, most notably the bodies of slain soldiers that could not be properly buried, into a unified and resolute (and notably nonobjective) form, Judd’s art conceals the anxieties of 186

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Monument on battlefield of Bull Run, photographed ca. 1861–­65, printed ca. 1880–­1889. Photographic print on card mount: half stereograph, albumen. Photographer unknown.

Fig. 82.

new technology that found their most pressing articulation in modern warfare under a ­stolid and silent surface. While Judd himself dismissed the form of the monument, saying that he found its characteristic imposingness “appalling,” his works with their geometric austerity and spatial engagement, contained a marked monumentality, which numerous critics and artists recognized.54 As in almost all war monuments, the violent content of Judd’s art is subsumed in the name of compositional unity and ideological closure. In his attempt to transcend what he saw as the irrational legacy of Western civilization through a faith in empirical objectivity, Judd nonetheless produced art that equally bears the traces of war. Created at a moment when a growing number of US citizens were beginning to question the integrity of their government’s policies both overseas and at home, Judd’s sculpture sought to counter a corresponding “credibility gap” between the known perceptual world and the assumed world of predigested images and ideas with objects of unwavering literalness while simultaneously registering the anxiety of the historical conditions in which they were produced.55 In his art from the 1960s Judd revitalized the neglected tradition of sculptural monuments, even as he made markers for a country unsure of its ideals and suspicious of heroism. The Credibility Gap

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Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982. National Park Service, Washington, DC.

Fig. 83.

Perhaps the final testimony to the monumentality of Judd’s art—­and minimalism more generally—­and its deep-­seated connection to the military history of the 1960s is manifested most clearly in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington built between 1980 and 1982 (fig. 83), a work that according to one critic demonstrates the movement’s retrospective canonization as “the unofficial language of memorial art.”56 With its austere, geometric, and nonobjective shape and its reflective surface of pol188

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ished gabbro, which from certain positions captures the Washington Obelisk that resides 400 yards to the west, the memorial incorporates some of the most characteristic aspects of minimalism into a categorically monumental structure. Moreover, as the art historian Lisa Saltzman has noted, the “logic of minimalist seriality is transformed by and into the chronological form of a timeline.”57 The serial component is most vividly revealed in the central crux of the structure where the two descending slabs of marble meet so that the names of the soldiers who died in the year of the first casualty, 1959, abut those who died in the last year of official combat, 1975. This arrangement requires that anyone walking from one end to the other transverses time in reverse while the smooth reflective surface of the edifice conjoins the reflection of the viewer with the chronologically listed names, merging past and present. Lin’s cunning transposition of the fallen soldier’s names into a nonhierarchical (and nonalphabetical) arrangement powerfully expressed a central facet of what was considered to be the most bureaucratized war in human history. The memorial’s rejection of the traditional lexicon of monumental architecture and sculpture has generally been understood as a conciliatory gesture, an ambivalent tribute to the United States’ most controversial and arguably most ineffective military endeavor. Unlike many traditional war monuments, there is no representation of fallen soldiers, no names of battles or even contextual information—­a fact that led to the erection of a more traditional figurative sculpture titled The Three Soldiers near Lin’s work in 1984.58 With its formal severity and the inclusion of the individual soldiers’ names inscribed on its facade, Lin’s monument was, for certain conservative critics, able to memorialize the dead without acknowledging the context of their loss, turning the casualties into “individual deaths, not deaths in a cause.”59 Yet if conservatives saw Lin’s monument as a proof of liberal wavering, a lack of patriotism, and the troubling personalization of the political, more sympathetic modernist beholders (who would probably find themselves on the opposite side of the political spectrum) might consider Lin’s apotheosis of minimal aesthetics a different sort of dilution, what one scholar has called a popularization of “the difficult formal vocabulary of minimalism, subverting its effects and thus making it accessible to a wider audience.”60 Whether one considers Lin’s memorial to represent a dilution or apotheosis of minimalist aesthetics, its alignment of these formal attributes with the conventions of the lexicon of the war memorial reveals the movement’s perhaps surprising relationship to a tradition of nonobjective and oftentimes geometric sculpture materialized in obelisks and cenotaphs.

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GREEN GALLERY INSTALLATION (R. MORRIS)

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CHAPTER FIVE THE EMPTY ROOM

It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. — sigmund

freud ,

“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” 1915

The spotless gallery wall is a perfect surface off which to bounce our paranoias. — brian o ’ doherty , “Inside the White Cube,” 1976

“I Can See the Whole Room! . . . And There’s Nobody In It!” These words, borrowed from a dime-­store detective comic book, where they float above the head of a man gazing out of a peephole, become, in Roy Lichtenstein’s painting of the same title from 1961, a potent allegory of the ideal conditions for aesthetic experience in the postwar era (fig. 84). By imagining the elimination of any beholders in front of the canvas, Lichtenstein’s painting slyly parodies the modernist principle of a disem­ bodied and disinterested mode of spectatorship in which the subjective contingencies of personal experience in no way influence the work’s ultimate significance. Beyond its engagement with the legacy of the monochrome and color field painting, the work presents a decidedly “forward looking” vision of the depopulated spaces that served in the ensuing decades as the privileged sites for experiencing and understanding the avowedly “dematerialized” advanced art of the period.1 Like a good avant-­garde work of art, I Can See the Whole Room imagines a yet-­to-­be-­realized future audience, or perhaps better stated, invites its present audience to imagine experiencing something unprecedented, something inconceivable. Increasingly throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, artists, and to a certain extent curators, materialized—­and as a corollary, viewers experienced—­the vacancy imagined in front of Lichtenstein’s painting. In 1968 Dan Flavin seemed to draw on the work’s central conceit in his Untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on not seeing anyone in the room) in which a “barricade” of nine white fluorescent light fixtures illuminate an inaccessible space with “nobody in it” (fig. 85). Around the same time Bruce Nauman

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Roy Lichtenstein, I Can See the Whole Room . . . And There’s Nobody in It!, 1961. Oil and graphite on canvas, 48 × 48 in. (121.9 × 121.9 cm). Private collection.

Fig. 84.

literalized such architectural inaccessibility in a group of works including Audio-­Video Underground Chamber (1972–­74) in which the interiors of hermetically sealed spaces were broadcast on closed circuit monitors. In a related piece, Live-­Taped Video Corridor from 1970 (fig. 86), Nauman disarmingly dramatized the annihilation of the perceiving subject imagined in Lichtenstein’s I Can See the Whole Room. The work consists of two monitors stacked one atop another at the end of a long narrow corridor, one displaying a prerecorded loop of the corridor in an unoccupied state and the other projecting the viewer’s image as seen from the entry of the corridor so that the televised body appears to shrink as it approaches the monitors, producing an unsuspecting performance of the disappearance of the human figure both as subject and audience in the art of the late 1960s. Between Lichtenstein’s painting of 1961 and Nauman’s installation nearly 192

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Dan Flavin, untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on not seeing anyone in the room), 1968. Cool white fluorescent light, 96 × 132 × 7 in. (243.8 × 335.3 × 17.8 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Accessions Committee Fund: Gift of Emily L. Carroll, Collectors Forum, Susan and Robert Green, Elaine McKeon, Modern Art Council, Helen and Charles Schwab, and Danielle and Brooks Walker Jr.

Fig. 85.

Bruce Nauman, Live-­Taped Video Corridor, 1970. Wallboard, video camera, two video monitors, video recording and video playback device, dimensions variable, approx. 12 ft. (or ceiling height) × 32 ft. × 20 in. (365.8 [or ceiling height] × 975.4 × 50.8 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Panza Collection, Gift, 1992. (92.4165).

Fig. 86.

a decade later can be discerned a trajectory in which empty space—­typically mediated through some form of technology, such as the Ben-­Day dots of Lichtenstein’s art with its shutter-­like oculus suggesting a photographic mode of vision, or more explicitly in ­Flavin’s use of fluorescent lighting and Nauman’s use of closed-­circuit television—­ becomes a privileged site of artistic investigation.

BOMB ART Understood as part of the broader countercultural critiques associated with the 1960s, this body of work presented—­or, considering the experiential form of address, invited participants to enact for themselves—­a potent antihumanist critique of universal The Empty Room

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subjectivity and teleological understandings of time. Ideally, a body moving through and around these objects would experience the fact of multiple, equally valid perceptual realities having no definitive significance. According to Rosalind Krauss’s influential reading, published in 1979, minimal and early installation art such as Flavin’s and Nauman’s realigned sculpture’s focus “to the outside, no longer modeling its structure on the pri­vacy of psychological space but on the public, conventional nature of what might be called cultural space.” Yet the precise coordinates of this cultural space in the years of minimalism’s emergence and expansion into installation-­based practices—­roughly between 1960 and 1975—­have for the most part yet to be delineated.2 By producing what seemed to be blank, unpopulated environments that encouraged unprecedented and unprescribed experiences, many artists associated with minimalism and its phenomenological legacy explored what could be called strategies of evacuation in which they relinquished their presence as creators and correspondingly produced works that diminished the physical presence of other viewers as well as the work itself. Yet motivating the stridency of these imperturbable visions of a cool, impersonal sensibility—­and, in turn, a new order of experience and possibly even society—­was a concern for humankind’s planetary survival. The emptiness and silence artists produced in the 1960s signaled the impending end of man (and with it, the end of history) in both its most utopian and apocalyptic implications. While these cultural meanings have been largely unrecognized in the conventional history of the art—­and may likely seem implausible to some people considering the mute vacancy at the heart of much minimalist art—­they are central to what could be considered the most unequivocal declaration of the empty room as aesthetic experience: William Anastasi’s Six Sites, which the artist exhibited in 1967 at the Dwan Gallery in New York (fig. 87). The works consist of six large screen prints on canvas based on photographs of the very walls on which they hung, rendered in a slightly reduced scale, so that the few architectural details such as the molding, electrical outlets, and air shaft grates appeared ­ attcock, arguably just above and below their real-­life referents. The critic Gregory B one of the most politically attuned minds writing about art in the 1960s, seemed to recognize, however vaguely, the political implications of this body of work. Admiring the “cerebral integrity” that he compares to “the candid observations of Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael and the films of Andy Warhol,” Battcock ends his review by asserting that “there is no credibility gap here,” invoking the contemporaneous term used to describe the growing sense of mistrust between many American citizens and their government.3 For Battcock, Anastasi’s show was a “prophetic exhibition” that “summed up, in confident and aware terms, what Minimal Art is all about.”4 Battcock’s provocative assertion draws on a strong if typically undeveloped understanding of minimalism, which recognized the work’s rigorous detachment, frank use of materials, and attention to context as 194

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Fig. 87.

Installation view of William Anastasi’s Six Sites exhibition at Dwan Gallery, New York, April 29,

1967.

objectifying an alternative model of social relations, keenly attuned to an impartial view of reality and freed from the grip of possessiveness and the illusions of political and commercial manipulation. This position was clearly articulated by the critic Barbara Rose, who, using words that in many ways describe Anastasi’s works better than the sculpture of Donald Judd for which they were written, praised minimalist works for the way they “insist on the coincidence of experience with reality” presenting viewers with expressly the sort of “experience that in no way misleads the senses.”5 Rose’s description of the experiential authenticity of minimalism reveals the ways in which its rhetoric of dispassionate objectivity extended the “Apollonian,” self-­ reflexive autonomy of the specific art object associated with high modernism into the “expanded” but still largely aesthetically circumscribed field of postmodernism. Concurrently, Battcock’s comparison of such illusion-­defying strategies with the “credibility gap” of American society (as well as Judd’s frequent invocation of the word “credible” as the preeminent criterion of aesthetic value in his own writings) suggests how this central strand of postwar aesthetics operated within the specific political contours in which it was produced. According to Battcock, the “prophetic,” confident summing up of minimalism’s cultural significance in Anastasi’s Six Sites—­what the critic abstractedly described as a critique of “the hypocrisy, distortion, and reaction characteristic of the modern world”—­was only fully articulated nearly thirty years later when, in an interview in 1989, the artist recalled how he saw these works—­and notably described them

The Empty Room

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at the time of their creation—­as powerfully engaged with the collective fear of nuclear annihilation.6 In the 1960s it seemed to me that the individual death that we had to contemplate in the past had now changed so that we had to contemplate collective death as well; now the hardware was in place to effect that. I remember sort of ironically telling people, Oh this is bomb art . . . because the nuclear age had changed everything. I mean, just looking ahead to the morning after, if we ever did it, we would realize instantly how unnecessary decoration is and how wonderful plain reality is if it’s accessible.7 Anastasi’s retrospective remarks suggest how the ascetic aesthetics of the empty room could simultaneously figure the utopian ideal of a world unburdened by material possessions—­what he described as “the Platonic idea that in a truly civilized utopian situation art would not be necessary”—­and the obliterated landscape of “the morning after” wrought by nuclear devastation.8 Indeed, the minimizing and ephemeralizing strategies artists and thinkers proposed in the 1960s as a means to promote a new sensibility were often grounded in a motivating fear of technological self-destruction. In 1964 Buckminster Fuller identified the related extremities of “utopia or oblivion” as the critical crossroads facing humanity. According to Fuller, because of the advances of science and technology that have enabled what he called “do-­invisibly-­more-­with-­invisibly-­less techniques,” human beings had reached a pivotal moment in history where scarcity of vital resources, which he notes have served as the primary agent of martial conflict throughout history, might become obsolete, and with it the threat of war. Ironically, the very technologies of “miniaturization” and “ephemeralization”—­primarily a “by-­product of the weaponry race,” he wrote—­could ideally remedy the military-­industrial complex, redirecting man’s creative energies toward more beneficial endeavors. While the characteristically optimistic Fuller emphasizes the liberatory potential of this new state of affairs, he nonetheless acknowledges the existential exigency motivating his utopian predictions. Quoting the scientist John Platt, Fuller warns, “The world has become too dangerous for anything less than utopia.”9 Anastasi’s canvases, based on photographs the artist took from the same location where viewers at the Dwan Gallery would later stand, subtly expressed the distinctly prospective trauma of human absence the bomb projected. By rigorously synchronizing themselves to particular spatial coordinates previously occupied by a now-­absent photographer, the works also signaled an equally undefined futurity embedded in their site-­specificity. If the canvases were ever exhibited in another location they would, as Battcock noted, “retain something of the gallery in which they originally hung,” making 196

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Robert Morris, installation view at Green Gallery, New York, December 1964–­January 1965. Left to right: Untitled (Table), Untitled (Corner Beam), Untitled (Floor Beam), Untitled (Corner Piece), Untitled (Cloud).

Fig. 88.

their brief exhibition at the Dwan Gallery a precarious monument to both the emergent new sensibility they seek to bring about and the fatal consequences of its belated arrival.10

THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE Battcock’s canny recognition that Anastasi’s Six Sites “summed up” the fundamental meaning of minimal art suggests how the perilous dynamics of utopia or oblivion, with its equally precarious future-­oriented temporality, deeply informed central aspects of the new sculpture of the 1960s. At around the same time that Lichtenstein painted I Can See the Whole Room, artists like Robert Morris and Judd began to produce large geometric structures whose architectural scale coupled with their unconventional, oftentimes industrial materials seemed to activate the surrounding gallery space and call attention to the viewer’s embodied relationship to the work (fig. 88). As Morris wrote in his influenThe Empty Room

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tial analysis of the new sculpture in 1966, “The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision.”11 Paradoxically, however, the spatial expansiveness of these works coupled with their often remarked on impersonality (rendered primarily through their characteristically simple forms and factureless surfaces) encouraged a particular mode of perception. ­ iewer’s ­Approaching Morris’s looming and often larger-­than-­human sculptural slabs, the v presence seems to be canceled out or at least atomized into it as an infinite number of possible subject positions (contingent on such variable factors as space, light, and one’s field of vision). According to Krauss, “Part of the meaning of much Minimal sculpture issues from the way in which it becomes a metaphorical statement of the self understood only in experience.”12 In other words, minimal art produced experiential situations that addressed the viewer in terms of immediate sensory perception and bodily engagement rather than on preconceived concepts and emotional responses based in the mind. Many critics have recognized the critical if not liberatory politics of these experiential effects, arguing that the unsentimental dramatization of the contingencies of subjective perception engendered by such art might help produce (or perhaps condition) a mode of being that could address the world free from totalizing presumptions, thus setting the stage for a new, more equitable, or at least less deluded, society. Yet this focus on experiential sensation in these works entailed a crucial degree of what could be called experiential seclusion. While the stoic presence of minimal art could be said to transform perceiving viewers into experiencing bodies it also isolated each body’s experience as unique and intransmissible, that, as Michael Fried surmised, “it is exists for [the individual viewer] alone,” canceling out the significance of other subjects, even the artist’s.13 Dan Graham recognized this fundamental feature of minimalism, writing that in the work of Judd, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt, “The artist and viewer are read out of the picture.”14 While the unadorned square metal plates that Andre placed directly on the gallery floor bore little signs of his presence as creator, the way the work seemed to become a stagelike demarcation of the air space extending above it, even while making no substantial claims on the room in which it was exhibited, presented viewers (or “experiencers”) of the work with a vivid demonstration of charged absence, whose invitation for bodily engagement—­Andre famously allowed gallery-­goers to walk on top of his floor pieces—­dramatized the individualized and intransmissible experiential component of his work (fig. 89). Responding to these artistic trends in 1967, Susan Sontag analyzed what she described as “The Aesthetics of Silence” prevalent in “a great deal of contemporary art,” which “annihilates the perceiving subject” and “seems moved by a desire to eliminate the audience from art, an enterprise that often presents itself as an attempt to eliminate ‘art’ altogether.”15 In 1964 Robert Smithson constructed a work consisting of crooked 198

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Carl Andre, 144 Pieces of Magnesium, 1969, and 100 Pieces of Lead, 1969. Installation view at Dwan Gallery, New York, 1969.

Fig. 89.

neon tubes set within an angled alcove of mirrored panels whose title, The Eliminator, accentuated its hermetic relationship to its audience. In a short text related to the work, Smithson asserted that his sculpture could make the viewer “aware of the emptiness of his own sight or sees through his own sight.”16 With the neon light reaching far beyond the sculpture itself, the work, like a great deal of the new sculpture of the 1960s, seemed to activate its surroundings, making the concept of a discrete object of ­aesthetic perception problematic. These mute, monumental structures were not so much objects of perception as objects of experience. The experience they regularly provided to the bodies that approached them, at least when they were initially exhibited, was of the world without human presence or, perhaps considering the existential near impossibility of imagining one’s own absence from the site of perception, an evacuated world perceived in isolation. This attention to space and one’s embodied experience of it has dominated the reception of minimal art since it was first recognized as a coherent movement in the mid-­1960s. By emphasizing the endlessly contingent relationship between the work, the  viewer, and the surrounding environment, such critical approaches keep the art object in what Robert Morris has memorably described as “the present tense of space.”17 The Empty Room

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Yet this sort of “dehumanized art” (to borrow Mel Bochner’s description of Larry Bell’s pristine glass cubes) was deeply engaged in broader social ideals and anxieties. Indeed, Bochner goes on to write that the “aggressive silence” of Bell’s art “makes them objects of the time they live in,” and he declared later in the same year that Judd’s work represents “a peculiar moment which wants to be read as an end to history.”18 In other words the sense of mute, albeit aggressive, timelessness these works provoked through their phenomenological address emerged out of prevailing cultural ideals and anxieties in which they were produced.

THE IMAGINATION OF DISASTER Considering the unbearable trauma of contemplating the end of the world, let alone one’s own nonexistence, it is understandable that this theme was seldom explicitly articulated by artists or recognized by critics, despite the fact that it was—­and arguably remains—­ the essential challenge facing a technologically advanced and in particular postatomic society. When artists directly addressed the subject, it was often couched in humor and fantasy, as in Jean Tinguely’s Study for the End of the World, No. 2 from 1962 in which the Swiss artist created a series of self-­destructive sculptures from mechanical remnants in the Nevada desert, just a few miles from the Nevada Test Site where the US government had been detonating atomic explosions since 1951.19 With its Rube Goldberg–­like intricacy proving ultimately dysfunctional during its televised performance, the work staged the fear of the inexorable technological processes initiated by man but ultimately beyond his control, a premise that was dramatized more overtly in films such as Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove (both 1964) and more allegorically in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes (both 1968). Indeed, science-­fiction projections of the future took a decidedly catastrophic turn in the years following World War II when the threat of nuclear war grounded cinematic fantasies of earthly devastation in an all-­too-­real political veracity. In her 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” Sontag argued that such films allowed viewers “to participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.” Despite long-­standing mythic precedents for these apocalyptic visions, Sontag, like other intellectuals of her time, saw the postatomic age as one of extreme precariousness in which the destruction of life on earth was an ever-­present and urgent reality. Echoing concepts asserted by philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Karl Jaspers in books with titles such as Has Man a Future and The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man (both 1961), that directly addressed the existential challenges of a postatomic age, Sontag wrote, “From now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable 200

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psychologically—­collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning.”20 Tinguely’s work represents an overt artistic engagement with the precarious fate of mankind explored more openly in popular genres, yet the frequent allusions to science and science fiction that rivaled the now more common phenomenological understanding of minimalism when it was first appeared suggest the broader, if less overt, influence of this apocalyptic imagination within the visual arts. While the critic John Perreault saw in Judd’s art an “implied IBM numerology” with its “icy science fiction surfaces of Flash Gordon bank vaults,” Robert Smithson, whose own writings and works were infused with science-­fiction motifs and concepts, described a “pink Plexiglass [sic] box” by Judd as suggesting “a giant crystal from another planet.” Likewise in his essay from 1966, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Smithson compared the work of Judd, LeWitt, Flavin, and Will Insley to the “Crystalline” language of “Damon Knight’s sci-­fi novel ‘Beyond the Barrier’ and related the lustrous surfaces of Craig Kauffman’s and Paul Thek’s art to the “slippery bubbling ooze from the movie The Blob.”21 The same year, the artist and writer Peter Hutchinson compared minimalist works to the “interiors of spaceships, alien spaceships” as well as the “alien machines” from Fred Saberhagen’s science-­fiction story “Stone Place” constructed “for the destruction of life.” The title of his article, “Is There Life on Earth,” indicated the posthuman ethos he saw at the core ­ inimalist aesthetic.22 of the m Smithson identified an ostensibly more factual and notably sculptural manifestation of these prognostications of mankind’s entropic future in an exhibition that took place at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Titled Can Man Survive?, the show focused on the ways humans have affected the Earth through the deleterious effects of pollution and overpopulation (fig. 90). Exhibition-­goers were led through a series of dark passageways constructed from a large metal truss—­invoking Fuller’s “­tensegrity” system of load-­bearing compression—­that occupied the museum’s Great Hall, giving the space a menacing sculptural effect recognized by the reviewer for the New York Times: “The visitor’s eyes are assaulted by protruding triangles, oversize spheres and thrusting industrial conduits.”23 Mounted during the museum’s centennial, the show was one of the costliest and most ambitious exhibitions ever staged, its multi­media extravagance advertising the institution’s relevance to the decade’s reigning youth culture. In an unpublished review of the exhibition, Smithson ridiculed what he saw as its facile engagement with current artistic styles, describing the cracked black cube bearing the exhibition’s title that greeted visitors as “a discarded example of ‘minimal art,’ ” and cataloging other ersatz artistic gestures such as the split screen film depicting “the balance of nature . . . in the manner of Andy Warhol,” an “ultraviolet painting done in a trivial ‘op art’ style, and ‘imitation Louise Nevelsons.’ ”24 While Can Man Survive? The Empty Room

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Installation view of the exhibition Can Man Survive? at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, 1969.

Fig. 90.

appropriated the formal lexicon of contemporary art to express the disquieting chal­ lenges of planetary survival, Smithson explored his own, notably more sanguine, interest in the end of humanity and history at the American Museum of Natural History, includ­ ing his eerie, red-­filtered footage of its Hall of Dinosaurs set to the slowed-­down, echoing soundtrack of a clock’s ticking in his movie Spiral Jetty and, in an essay coauthored with Mel B ­ ochner, describing how the “illustrations of catastrophes and remote times” paint­ ed on the walls behind the dinosaur skeletons presented a vision of the Earth in which “the problem of the human figure vanishes” and “history no longer exists.”25

THE EMPTY ROOM This premonition of a “lost world” devoid of humans that artists like Smithson and ­Bochner recognized in the re-­creations of “Archaeozoic” Earth and the futuristic sur­ faces of minimal art was registered in the work’s essentially unprecedented mode of photographic reproduction.26 As James Meyer has argued, because works of minimal art made the question of their aesthetic boundaries ambiguous and expansive, many of the 202

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Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966, Robert Morris, Untitled (L-Beams), 1965, and Robert Grosvenor, Transoxiana, 1965. Installation view of the exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, New York, April 27–­June 12, 1966.

Fig. 91.

“earliest minimalist shows were designed, and received, as installations.”27 By making the surrounding gallery an integral component of their aesthetic experience, these works necessitated a new mode of documentation in which the entire gallery or a large section of it was included in the image. As is evident in now canonical installation shots of such groundbreaking exhibitions of the new works as Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum (fig. 91) and Donald Judd and Robert Morris’s shows at the Green Gallery in 1963 and 1964 respectively (many of the shots were taken by Rudy Burckhardt, who brought a similar spatial sensitivity to his famous photographs of Jackson Pollock painting in his studio), this type of art demanded that it be reproduced amid its surroundings, which were commonly depicted in a depopulated state. Or perhaps a better way to state this would be that the depopulated space surrounding the work was made visible like never before.28 Dan Flavin’s various descriptions of the gallery in his writings as a “spatial container,” “the volume of space,” and “the box that is the room” underscore his interest in the surrounding space as a sculptural component in his work. This aspect found a clever materialization in a layout published in Look magazine in 1968 that featured a collage The Empty Room

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Spread from Look magazine (January 8, 1968) featuring Arnold Newman, Portrait of Dan Flavin in Kornblee Gallery, 1967.

Fig. 92.

of photographs taken by Arnold Newman that readers could cut out and fold so as to recreate in miniature the spatial effect of the installation (fig. 92). In the accompanying text the critic Phillip Leider wrote that “Flavin’s ‘proposals’ usually take possession of an entire room, making it part of, rather than a container for, the e­ ffect. To simulate this, fold the four walls in the photograph ‘up.’ ”29 Readers of Look may have required a tangible demonstration of the gallery space’s newfound significance as a component of aesthetic experience (and its identity as a boxlike minimalist object in its own right); readers of Artforum and other prominent art journals, who could take the aestheticization of the gallery space as a given by the mid-­1960s, were instead presented with scrupulous descriptions of the artwork’s effect on its surroundings so that walls, ceilings, and windows seemed to become formal elements in the aesthetic experience. This sort of confusion between works of art and their 204

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Installation view of the exhibition Dan Flavin at Kornblee Gallery, New York, January 7–­February 2, 1967.

Fig. 93.

a­ rchitectural setting is captured in Lucy Lippard’s description of Morris’s Green Gallery exhibition of 1965, in which her analysis seems equally applicable to the sculptures and their setting: “The room full of off-­white architectural wooden structures unintentionally but unavoidably produces an environmental impression.”30 The reviewer for ARTnews described the works as “disturbing,” going on to conclude that “their silence is both empty and provocative.”31 The simple forms and architectural connotations of materials like plywood and lighting fixtures in Morris’s and Flavin’s art further directed one’s attention beyond the discrete objects and into the proximities around them, so that for certain viewers the work became nearly imperceptible. Perreault, reviewing Flavin’s exhibition at the Kornblee Gallery in January 1967 (fig. 93), documented in the photograph published in Look magazine, noted that “to the uninitiated the gallery might have seemed empty and the ornate fireplace curiously outstanding.”32 “Initiated” viewers like Bochner, who would begin to create his own version of the empty room as installation with his Measurement Rooms in 1968, in fact experienced the inverse effect. Flavin’s art, he The Empty Room

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claimed, “dematerialized” the gallery space so that “a vacancy ensued that was as much part of the work as the arrangement of the fixtures.”33 For viewers who would not be confused by the artist’s use of everyday fluorescent lights, the “incorporeal radiation” (to use the critic Jill Johnson’s description) emitted by Flavin’s art still contained equally evacuative effects in the way it “demolished corners” and “obliterated [fixtures] by cross shadows.”34 In his review of the show Battcock described how the emitted light “completely filled” the gallery so that “the observer is totally enveloped” in it. This despite the fact that “the pieces use up practically no space, yet the end result is one of exceptionally aggressive sculptures.”35 Critics repeatedly commented on the way the artist’s installations emphasized the apparent emptiness of the gallery in which they were exhibited. One writer compared “Flavin’s empty room” to “Mallarme’s famous white page,” while Robert Smithson wrote that “what’s interesting about Dan Flavin’s art is not only the ‘lights’ themselves, but what they do to the phenomenon of the ‘barren room.’ ”36 Similarly, Bochner noted how “both Andre and Flavin exhibit acute awareness of the phenomenology of rooms,” making such “roomness,” he argued, “into operative artistic factors.”37 Flavin’s work, with the still relatively novel fluorescent tubes emitting their unearthly, cool light and faint, incessant mechanical buzz, would have seemed particularly effective as a means of projecting a sense of forceful vacancy that encompassed not only the art and its surroundings but also the viewing subjects themselves. The experience of vacancy produced by Flavin’s and other minimalists’ art would be distilled and expanded on by subsequent artists who made the empty gallery a site for sensitizing perception and modeling new forms of subjectivity, freed from the constraints of inherited conventions and the burden of the past. While the French artist Yves Klein first established the precedent for an empty gallery as a discrete work of art with his exhibition The Void at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris in 1959, it would be a group of young artists working primarily in the United States at the end of the 1960s who would explore most fully the empty or near empty gallery as a site of institutional critique, perceptual expansion, and social commentary. In 1966 Andy Warhol publicly renounced painting with a show at the Leo Castelli Gallery featuring one empty room covered in wallpaper featuring Day-­Glo cows (perhaps referring to the “apocalyptic wallpaper” described by the critic Harold Rosenberg in his famous essay on action painting) and another room containing silver balloon “clouds” that floated around the ceiling (one outlying phallic-­shaped balloon used to test the helium-­filled Mylar structures and launched on the roof of the Factory was dubbed “the missile” by members of the artist’s coterie). Artists such as Michael Asher and Robert Huot elaborated on the spatial expansiveness brought about by minimalism and turned the gallery space itself into the principle site of aes­thetic consideration. They fashioned sparse, subtly reconditioned chambers that encouraged a prolonged and sensitive perceptual engagement (fig. 94). 206

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Robert Huot, Two Blue Walls, 1969. Sanded floor coated with polyurethane. Installation view at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, March–­April 1969.

Fig. 94.

Other artists associated with the emergent conceptual and body-­based practices that dematerialized the work of art created aesthetic situations in which the gallery space appeared remarkably empty. This might be because the art existed primarily in the artist’s or viewer’s body, as in Barry Le Va’s Velocity Piece #1: Impact Run, E ­ nergy Drain (1968) in which the artist ran from one end of an empty gallery to the other, slamming his body into each wall, for 103 minutes. Or it might be because the work itself was essentially imperceptible, as in Robert Barry’s pieces in which, as he put it, “various kinds of energy which exist outside the narrow arbitrary limits of our own senses” such as microwaves and radiation were emitted in what appeared to many visitors to be an empty gallery (fig. 95).38 In 1969 Barry mounted a series of Closed Gallery Pieces, confronting gallery visitors with a sign tersely declaring that the gallery would be closed during the run of the exhibition. Reviewing a show that included one of Barry’s carrier wave pieces organized by Seth Siegelaub in 1969 and titled 0 OBJECTS, 0 PAINTERS, 0 SCULPTURES . . . (fig. 96), Battcock celebrated how “there’s nothing to steal, nothing to damage, no images to remember later.” As in his commentary on Anastasi’s Six Sites, Battcock saw the near invisibility of such art in exceptionally strong political terms, writing, The Empty Room

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Robert Barry, Radiation Piece (detail) 1969. Installation view at FER Collection, Laupheim, Germany.

Fig. 95.

Installation view of the exhibition January 5–­31, 1969 at Seth Seigelaub Gallery, New York, January 5–­31, 1969. Featuring works by Douglas Huebler (books on window sill), Lawrence Weiner (rug stain), Robert Barry (labels), and Joseph Kosuth (newspapers).

Fig. 96.

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this is perhaps the first exhibit this season that really goes someplace and offers something a little bit new and something that really matters. It’s like every­thing that happened in 1968, at Columbia and Paris and all other symbolic places is finally being understood, and it all REALLY meant something and it really will result in something because it already has in this show. Finally in art, the revolution that one sometimes briefly understands at perhaps the Fillmore, or late night in WBAI, or in weird, unexpected glimpses at surprising places around town, or watching a Warhol movie or in unplanned encounters with sex or metaphysics or acid or grass or just nice people—­it’s here in art.39 Battcock’s breathless celebration of the paradoxical materialization of the revolutionary politics of the counterculture within the empty gallery space reveals how a certain type of viewer—­one who embraced what Susan Sontag called the “new sensibility” in which distinctions between high and low culture were abolished—­approached the undeniably radical aesthetic of such works. Lucy Lippard recognized the potent if primarily prospective political implications of this ephemeral, dematerialized, and experiential art. In her introduction to the catalog for the 1969 exhibition 557,087 in Seattle, she conveyed the democratizing and ultimately utopian promise these works possessed: Art intended as pure experience doesn’t exist until someone experiences it, defying ownership, reproduction, sameness. Intangible art could break down the artificial imposition of ‘culture’ and provide a broader audience for a tangible, object art. When automatism frees millions of hours for leisure, art should gain rather than diminish in importance, for while art is not just play, it is the counterpoint to work. The time may come when art is everyone’s daily occupation, though there is no reason to think this activity will be called art.40 Lippard aligned these practices to more explicitly political ends, staging a benefit exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1969 for the Art Workers’ Coalition, a group of artists and critics who organized in 1969 to make museum policies more open and equitable, which featured a group of willfully self-­effacing and hardly noticeable pieces such as Huot’s Two Blue Walls and Rosemarie Castoro’s Cracking #17. Critics writing in the wake of what they saw as Lippard’s “profoundly utopian (and now unimaginably naïve)” vision instead emphasized the way that these evacuative, ephemeral, and visually ascetic artistic strategies could reveal and undermine the present ideologies that sustained the cultural legitimization and commodification of radical art.41 For instance, Huot’s simple gesture of paintings two walls of the gallery blue and carefully sanding the floors and coating them with polyurethane suggested a mode of artistic practice that The Empty Room

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evaded commodification and sought to heighten gallery-­goers’ awareness of the specific situation in which aesthetic perception occurs. Understood as an extension of the leftist doctrine of “naming the system,” as expressed in a speech given by Paul Potter, president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), at an antiwar rally in Washington in 1965, the politics of such practices, often categorized under the sign of institutional critique, aimed to exact change through a careful and dispassionate analysis of the various forms of social organization that sustained deluded and unjust policies. Despite their apparent focus on major artistic establishments like MoMA, some of these institutionally based activities did address broader and more explicit political issues. Most famously, members of the Art Workers’ Coalition created a poster featuring Ronald Haeberle’s notorious photograph depicting a pile of corpses taken after an army raid on the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968, which they used in a protest event in front of Picasso’s Guernica at MoMA in January 1970. This action, and the unauthorized distribution of the posters in the museum’s lobby, took place alongside an exhibition that sought to present the emerging trend in environmental and experiential art. The show, titled Spaces, included a so-­called dead room constructed by Michael Asher that silenced all reverberations of sound, both external and internal, and an arrangement of glass planes by Larry Bell that dimly reflected visitors as they moved about the dark space. Dore ­Ashton, who ended her review of the show reprimanding MoMA’s retracted participation in the production of the My Lai poster, seemed to recognize how certain aspects of the spatial aesthetics addressed in the exhibition could be understood as a response, albeit a largely reactionary one, to the tumultuous political events of the decade, citing recent research on sensory deprivation chambers that suggested how the sort of aesthetics of experience offered by Asher and Bell could possibly lead to people becoming “indifferent to the chaos of existence.”42 While Ashton saw works like Asher’s as solipsistic retreats from the urgent social issues of the moment—­at best propeace rather than antiwar—­Battcock, in the first of two reviews he wrote about of the show, titled The Politics of Space, argued for a more material agency in such art, writing that the artists “view space as a precious resource that is in danger of being used up. They display an ecological commitment toward empty space on a human scale. They warn us of the necessity for modern man to conserve and honor space and, in this sense, their work possesses broad social implications.”43 In his second review, published one month later, Battcock acknowledged the political complicity of the exhibition’s ambitious installations, lamenting how despite it being “probably the most brilliant, thoughtful and intelligent exhibition presented” by the museum in ten years, “it’s too bad that nobody noticed that many of the contributors to the show (or their parent companies) engage in research and production activities that either directly or indirectly, have benefited the Department of Defense and American genocide in Vietnam.”44 210

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Robert Barry, Marcuse Piece, 1970–­present. Vinyl letters mounted on wall, dimensions variable.

Fig. 97.

Yet Battcock is characteristically anomalous in his consideration of the political context in which such art was created or its related strident tone. Even more sympa­ thetic critics of minimalism and the aesthetics of the empty room who emphasize the critical and even politically activist potential of the expansive and institutionally directed strategies typically disregard the more constructive and culturally expressive aspects of these artistic practices. Focusing on the works’ rhetoric of phenomenological presence and institutional reflexivity, such readings misrecognize (perhaps out of embarrassment for what they take to be its utopian naïveté or because of their traumatic intimations of nonexistence) the complex and intelligent futurological imagination of this art, its vision of a world on the brink of radical transformation. The promise and dread that motivated the futurological imagination of the aes­ thetics of the empty room were articulated no more than indirectly by some of the works’ earliest critics and, in the case of Anastasi’s Six Sites, more clearly by the artist only retrospectively. Robert Barry’s Marcuse Piece from 1970 makes explicit the underlying politics, whether understood as radically posthumanist or tragically post-­human-­race, informing the extreme vacancy of a significant strand of artistic production in the 1960s (fig. 97). Citing the final lines from Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation (1969), The Empty Room

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the work consists only of a nominal linguistic prompt that can be installed in multiple venues. The textual excerpt—­which in fact is in a quotation that the philosopher cited from “a young black girl”—­invites viewers to see the space in which the words appear as “a place to which we can come and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do.’ ” In the essay that inspired Barry’s piece the philosopher expands on how a “new sensibility,” developed primarily in the artistic realm but enacted in the “dematerialization of labor” and the subsequent redirecting of science and technology toward peaceful, nonexploitative ends, would lead to a “sensitivity receptive to forms and modes of reality which thus far have been projected only in the aesthetic imagination.” Like his equally idealistic contemporary Fuller, Marcuse does not linger on the harrowing alternatives to the new sensibility. Only at the end of his essay, three pages away from the quotation Barry used, does the philosopher warn that inaction on the part of today’s youth could lead to “the advent of a long period of ‘civilized’ barbarism, with or without nuclear destruction.”45 Understood in this light, the vacancy of Barry’s piece insinuates the imperative necessity of the world it prefigures. The particularly impending address of the Marcuse Piece, inviting visitors to think about “what we are going to do,” is registered in the eternally expansive dates the artist gave to the work: 1970–­present. This durational, seemingly endless experience the work proposed suggests the (presumably still deferred) revolutionary action needed to bring about the utopian state envisioned by the philosopher as well as the emancipatory leisure that this new world would afford. As in Anastasi’s Six Sites, a current absence (revolution, the photographic instant of the image) overlaps with an as-­yet-­to-­be realized future (utopia, the canvases’ forever out of joint existence beyond the Dwan Gallery). Sontag identified this powerful future-­oriented infinity commonly found in “the aesthetics of silence” as a form of “apocalyptic” thinking, which she goes on to add “must endure the indignity of all apocalyptic thinking: namely, to prophesy the end, to see the day come, to outlive it, and then set a new date for incineration of consciousness and the definitive pollution of language and exhaustion of the possibilities of art discourse.”46 Such missed encounters with the apocalypse—­whether atomic or utopian—­in many ways define the postwar landscape of the United States. The moment of minimalism’s emergence as a dominant aesthetic paradigm was powerfully marked by two instances of deferred apocalypse and utopia: the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the less conventional and categorically less traumatic war on poverty President Johnson declared in 1964. One might argue that the succeeding persistence of the human race and its unequal distribution of vital resources has inured many people to the urgency that once attended these respective imminent ends. As such concepts became outlived, as we learned to, if not love, at least live with the bomb and poverty, the stridency that originally informed the underlying politics of minimalism and the aesthetics of the empty room, 212

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like the futurological imagination expressed in the simulated dereliction of the sculpture of the 1950s, became increasingly obscure to subsequent generations of viewers and were replaced with, on one hand, an academicized understanding of its institutionally bound politics and, on the other, an aestheticized appreciation for the experience of spatial vacancy and architectural dilapidation. The aestheticization and academization of the political implications and expressive capacities of the spatial expansiveness of minimalist practices (as well as the figurations of entropy that informed the simulated dereliction of the welded sculpture of the 1950s and the process-­oriented practices associated with land art) found an early and, in many ways, definitive manifestation in the exhibition that inaugurated the alternative art space MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York, in the fall of 1976. The show, titled ROOMS (P.S.  1), featured the work of seventy-­eight artists (including a number of figures addressed in this book such as Carl Andre, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gordon Matta-­Clark, Bruce ­Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, and Richard Serra) and established an influential precedent for a practice of installation-­based art created exclusively and often temporarily for a single exhibition. Expanding the site-­specificity that was inferred in minimalism’s activation of the gallery space and made explicit in various examples of land art into a direct engagement with a particular architectural setting, the works in the show, while only occasionally making reference to the building’s previous existence as a public school, frequently emphasized its long period of disuse before taking on its new function as an art space. This was particularly the case with artists like Carl Andre, who arranged columns of cement blocks on the corners of the cracked paving stones of the school’s empty playground, and Richard Nonas, who placed a single, five-­foot-­long steel beam across the floor of an empty classroom, so that the rough and crude materials of the works seemed to share with what one critic called “the building’s time-­inflected roughness.”47 Indeed, for another reviewer, “An uninitiated observer could not have distinguished the art from the natural decay of the decrepit building.”48 The resemblance between the crude materiality of many of the works on display and the rough interiors of the old schoolhouse was also noted by Rosalind Krauss who, in a pair of essays written in response to the ROOMS exhibition, described how numer­ ous artists in the show “exploited the derelict condition of the building itself: its rotting floors, its peeling paint, its crumbling plaster,” in order “to capture the presence of the building.” For Krauss these strategies registered “an extraordinary sense of time-­past” in the works, which suggested significant correspondences to indexical practices like photography. For other critics these strategies had the effect of emphasizing and aestheticizing the exhibition space itself.49 The same year of PS1’s opening, Brian O’Doherty published his series of essays in Artforum titled “Inside the White Cube.” In these ­essays he identified this heightened attentiveness to the “gallery structure” as “the prime icon” The Empty Room

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of the art of the 1970s and the blank, evacuated gallery as the fundamental precondition for any aesthetic experience whatsoever. “We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first.” While O’Doherty could still discern the posthumanist principles emanating from the recently enervated space of a white cube, describing how the idealized timeless space of the gallery makes it seem as if “one has to have died already to be there,” by the time the essays were republished in 1986, he forecasted their impending total oblivion. “Suffice it to say here,” he stated in the afterword, “that the elusive and dangerous art of the period between 1964 and 1976 is sinking, with its ­lessons, out of sight as, given the conditions of our culture, it must.”50 By 1990, Krauss similarly diagnosed the waning of the politics of minimalist phenomenology, arguing that the promise of unmediated embodied experience generated by such art might serve a “compensatory” function for an audience of alienated subjects increasingly immersed in a world of disembodied virtuality. Indeed, she argues that the dynamics of accommodation and normalization augured by these works and the refurbished industrial spaces in which they were increasingly exhibited may have already been implicit in minimalism’s embrace of industrial modes of fabrication. Thus the rise of what Krauss called “the late capitalism museum,” exemplified by institutions such as Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (1999), Tate Modern, London (2000), Dia:Beacon (2003), and to cite another early and influential model, Donald Judd’s vast restoration of Fort D. A. Russell in Marfa, Texas, beginning in 1978, reflects not only the ways that gallery space has changed to accommodate postminimalist artistic practice that draws on industrial materials and expansive scale but may also simultaneously reflect hegemonic values of neoliberal capitalism and seek to assuage its psychic effects.51 As such, one might ask if the current appreciation—­and even popularization of—­the aesthetics of the empty room vividly materialized in what Krauss pointedly describes as “the burnished neutrality” of the renovated industrial ruins that often house such works represents the apotheosis of Walter Benjamin’s chilling premonition that a moment might come in the history of humanity when “its self-­alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”52 The apotheosis of minimal art as the period style of the advanced art of the late twentieth century has arguably inflected the way that all works of art, no matter their medium, are understood to occupy and activate space, and register the ever-­changing contingencies of their contextual situation. Could it be that the triumph of minimal art reflects not only, as Krauss would have it, the tightening grip of consumer capitalism and its affective mechanisms on all realms of experience, but also serves another sort of compensatory function related to our refusal to confront how the demands of consumption, with its related consequences of resource extraction, unchecked market expansion, and military interventions, foreshadows the extinction of the human species, whether due 214

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to war or some other form of technologically driven annihilation? Perhaps the popular appre­ciation for the aesthetics of industrial dereliction, evident as much in the decorously dilapidated floors and ceilings of spaces like Dia:Beacon as in the current chic for the postindustrial blight of cities like Detroit speaks to what Dora Apel has argued is “the paradoxical appeal of ruin imagery: as faith in a better future erodes, the beauty of decay helps us cope with the terror of apocalyptic decline.”53 As such our tendency to “see the space first” signals not only the fading from view of the original implications of the danger and elusiveness of these works, their invocation of utopia and oblivion, but more significantly perhaps, our incapacity to experience their projection of a future different from the present to which we have, for better or worse, accommodated ourselves. Krauss’s etiology of the complex interrelations between the spatially expansive and bodily affective art of the 1960s and the broader political forces in which it was produced and continues to circulate resonates with the sorts of readings I have sought to present in the preceding pages. I would only emphasize the imbrication of the forces of consumer capitalism and those of the military industrial complex and note how the ways that the real and imagined threat of war have been used to marshal these energies. Moreover, and more central to the thesis of this book, I would argue that these interrelated factors have crucially informed some of the most influential art of the second half of the twentieth century. As such the works that I have been considering not only reveal, often with extraordinary intelligence and in certain cases unexpected pathos, the complex and often contradictory factors that shaped the contemporary world that we have inherited from the recent past but also allow us to consider, as Barry’s Marcuse Piece asks us, “what we are going to do.” In their dual functions as witnesses to a largely forgotten past and occasions for the reflection on possible futures, these works of art serve the conventional purposes of monuments and, like their more traditional counterparts that continue to be erected—­and occasionally are razed—­within the public sphere, compel us to consider what sort of narratives we tell ourselves about our society and what sort of society we hope to sustain or establish into the future.

The Empty Room

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION: ­M ONUMENTALISM AND­ METHOD 1  Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People,” January 17, 1961. https:// www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about _ike/speeches/farewell_address.pdf. Accessed December 15, 2017. 2  “Statement by the President Announcing the Use of the A-­Bomb at Hiroshima,” August 6, 1945. Harry Truman Papers, University of Missouri. https://www .trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=100. Accessed December 11, 2017.

12 

Jean-­Paul Sartre, “The End of the War,” Les Temps Moderne (October 1945); reprinted in Situations III, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Seagull Books, 2008), 71–­72. “Here we are,” Sartre wrote, “back at the millennium. Each morning. We shall be on the eve of the end of time, on the eve of the day when our honesty, courage and goodwill will no longer have any meaning for anyone, and will perish, together with ill-­will, spite and fear, no distinction remaining between them. After the death of God, the death of man is now announced.” Foucault would prophesy the end of man in the final pages of his The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 387, declaring that “one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (387). Robert Smithson, “Art and Dialectics,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 371.

On the relation between systems theory and the interstate highway system, see Peter Galison “War against the Center,” Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): 5–­33.

4 

William Faulkner, speech at the Nobel banquet at the city hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950. https://www. nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates /1949/faulkner-speech.html. Accessed January 10, 2018.

5 

Tennessee Williams, “Hans Hoffman: An Appreciation,” Derrière le Miroir 16 (January 1949): 5.

6 

Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 18 (Spring 1951); reprinted in Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 560. Jackson Pollock, “Interview with William Wright” (1950), in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 22.

7 

For accounts of these artists’ possible responses to the war and its aftermath, see Serge Guilbaut, Be-­Bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images and All That Jazz, 1946–­1956 (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona, 2007); Stephen Peterson, “ ‘Forms Disintegrate’: Painting in the Shadow of the Bomb,” in Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–­1965, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2016), 140–­45; and David McCarthy, American Artists against War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). On the later antiwar art of the 1960s, see Sally Yard, The Shadow of the Bomb (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1984); Lucy Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1990); Matthew Israel, Kill for Peace: American Artists against the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). For a good overview of the ways that the widespread anxiety about the bomb shapes postwar society, see

14  An intimation of this relationship between postmodern skepticism and the bomb is sketched out in Jacques Derrida’s essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14 (Summer 1984): 24, in which he argues for the essentially textual basis of nuclear war, suggesting that humanity’s drive toward an unrealizable apocalypse might in some way be a function of Western logocentrism, so that in theory, a new form of language would make such apocalyptic technology if not unthinkable certainly less fraught. “The anticipation of nuclear war (dreaded as the fantasy, or phantasm, of a remainderless destruction) installs humanity—­and through all sorts of relays even defines the essence of modern humanity—­in its rhetorical condition.” 15  Tom Engelhardt, in The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), argues that the responsibilities of victory inflected significant facets of US politics and cultures in the years after the war, only to crumble with the end of the Vietnam War. 16  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Two Notes on the End of the World,” New Left Review (July/August 1978): 74. 17  Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 356.

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Miller, Time of the Assassins, vii.

13 

Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 201.

9 

10  Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999). The term was originally used by Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War,” The Nation, September 11, 1967, 198–­212. 11  Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins (1956; New York: New Directions, 1962), vii, 131.

3 

8 

Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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18  Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 1986), 79–­80. Originally published in three parts as “Inside the White Cube” in 1976 in the March, April, and November issues of Artforum.

that “the governing category [in the text’s argument] is still the monument, or the loss of the monument, or the negative monument.” In Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture, ed. Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 9.

19  Buckminster Fuller, “Utopian or Oblivion,” in ­Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Bantam, 1969), 265–­92.

32  James E. Young, “Monument,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 236.

20  Numerous writers have portrayed the possible apocalyptic scenarios of global warming. See, for instance, John Varley, Slow Apocalypse (New York: Ace, 2013); Alan Weisman, The World without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007); and Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015).

33  Recent notable examples of monument studies include Erika Doss, The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Dell Upton, What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

21  Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 371. 22  Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 565.

34  The mantra “keep going” comes from Alain ­Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 91.

23  Lewis Mumford, “The Death of the Monument,” in Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, ed. J. L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, and N. Gabo (New York: Praeger, 1971), 264.

35  Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 11.

24  Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development,” trans. Karin Bruckner with Karen Williams, in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1996), 69. 25  Anthony Vidler, “Monument, Memory, and Modernism,” http://archweb.cooper.edu/exhibitions/kahn /essays_02.html.

Andrew M. Shanken, “Planning Memory: Living Memorials in the United States during World War II,” Art Bulletin 84 (March 2002): 130. 26 

Sigfried Giedion, “The Need for a New Monumentality”; Philip L. Goodwin, “Monuments”; and Louis Kahn, “Monumentality,” all in New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium, ed. Paul Zucker (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 577–­88. 28  Thomas H. Creighton, The Architecture of Monuments: The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Competition (New York: Reinhold, 1962), 12, 11.

30  James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 185. According to Meyer, this “ desemanticization” characterizes the possible politics of minimalist art.

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38  Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 3. 39 

Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, xvii.

41  Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 42  Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 236. 43  Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, Afro-­ Futurism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-­Blackness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). For another consideration of the identarian politics driving anxieties surrounding the Anthropocene see, Nicholas Mirzoeff, “It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene; or, the Geological Color Line,” in After Extinction, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 123–­50.

29  Lewis Mumford, “Monumentalism, Symbolism, and Style,” Architectural Review 106 (April 1949): 173. For a good analysis of the discussion on monumentalism in the 1940s and ’50s and its relation to the postwar milieu, see Jeffrey Lieber, Flintstone Modernism, or, the Crisis in Postwar American Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 40–­43.

Notes to Introduction

37  Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

40  Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” ARTnews 69 (January 1971): 22–­39, 67–­71.

27 

31  Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 36. Recently, in a roundtable discussion about Krauss’s essay, Benjamin Buchloh has stated

36  Anthony Vidler, “Air War and Architecture,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 32.

44  Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 45  Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis: University of ­Minnesota Press, 2018), 1, 7. 46  President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, January 28, 2014. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ the-press-office/2014/01/28/president

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-barack-obamas-state-union-address. Accessed December 17, 2017.

CHAPTER ONE: THE NEW SENSE OF FATE 1  Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-­Garde (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 69, writes that the avant-­garde is “conscious of being the precursors of the art of the future.” Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque (New York: Scribner’s and Sons, 1906), 24.

2 

Alfred Barr, quoted in “Thinking of Today . . . and Eternal Things,” Newsweek, June 1, 1964, 48. The museum is a “torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-­ advancing present, its tail, the ever-­receding past of 50 to 100 years ago.” For a discussion of Barr’s diagram, see Kirk Varnedoe, “The Evolving Tor­pedo: Changing Ideas of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-­Century: Continuity and Change (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 12–­73.

3 

Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins (1956; New York: New Directions, 1962), 36, 33. For a discussion of the role of prophecy in Miller’s conception of the artist, see Bertrand Mathieu, Orpheus in Brooklyn: Orphism, Rimbaud, and Henry Miller (The Hague: Mouton, 1976). A similar catastrophic outlook pervaded the popular anthology tellingly titled One World or None (New York: Whittlesey House/McGraw-­Hill, 1946), published one year after the end of the war and containing essays by luminaries such as Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. In the book’s introduction Arthur Compton outlined the fatal crossroads facing humanity:

4 

The terrific blast at Hiroshima shocked the world into a realization that catastrophe lies ahead if war is not eliminated. This great fear has for the time being overshadowed the hope that atomic energy may vastly enrich human life if given a chance. We now have before us the clear choice between adjusting the pattern of our society on a world basis so that wars cannot come again, or following the outworn tradition of national self-­defense, which if carried through to its logical conclusion must result in catastrophic conflict. (v) Barnett Newman, “Surrealism and the War,” published in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 95. André Breton noted the prophetic capacities of Tanguy’s work in a short text titled “Look Out,” in which he stated: “the elements of Tanguy’s paintings which defy interpretation and are consequently hard to keep in mind, will become clearly understood in relation to the future development of the mind.” In Yves Tanguy par André Breton, trans. David Imbs (New York: Pierre Matisse, 1946), 69. For a discussion of Europe after the Rain as a premonition of the destruction caused by World War II, see Ralph Ubl, Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting between the Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 181.

5 

Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate” (1948), in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 169, 165, 168, 169, 165. A highly condensed version of the ideas contained in the essay would appear as “The Object and the Image,” Tiger’s Eye (March 1948); reprinted in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 170. (The original version was rejected because of its length.) Newman would reiterate these ideas in the notes for the essay: “Today no terror. Atomic Bomb. Bomb is new after that disappeared with Greeks. We are not afraid. Bomb hangs like fate. No matter what we do as individuals we are helpless. Renewed tragedy of action. One man pushing a button can kill his father and desecrate his mother. . . . Hiroshima showed it to us. We know what to fear and we are no longer afraid. We have lost our terror [the following passage is crossed out] the atomic bomb has robbed us of our terror.” Barnett Newman, handwritten outline notes for “The New Sense of Fate,” ca. 1947–­48. Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. Reprinted in Richard Schiff, Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 75 and 111n.

6 

About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “ELI, ELI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?” that is, “MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?” And some of those who were standing there, when they heard it, began saying, “This man is calling for Elijah.”

7 

Lawrence Alloway, “The Stations of the Cross and the Subjects of the Artist,” in Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross; Lema Sabachthani (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966), 15, 13, 12. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, letter to the editor, New York Times, June 13, 1943; reprinted in Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 545.

8 

Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1956), 16.

9 

10  This information, along with a wealth of material about the sculpture’s production, can be found in Nan Rosenthal, “The Sculpture of Barnett Newman,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, ed. Melissa Ho (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 115–­31. In his extensive analysis of the work, Zweite interprets the rough edges and the fragmentary tip as suggesting infinite extension. Armin Zweite, Barnett Newman: Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper (New York: Distributed by D.A.P., 1999), 276. This reading seems counteracted by the use of Corten with its associations of corrosion as well as the general dynamic of the piece, which seem to cant inward on itself rather than outward. 11  See G[regory] B[attcock], “Sculpture at Knoedler,” Arts 44 (February 1970): 62; and Andrew Hudson, “Scale as Content: Bladen, Newman, Smith at the Corcoran,” Artforum 6 (December 1967): 47. 12  This aspect of the work was noted by Harold Rosenberg who wrote how Newman’s act of “covering with a patina of rust a sculpture made for him in a machine shop may be regarded as a protest against both the shiny surfaces and the rationalism of the kind of art with which he is usually identified.” “Time in the Museum,” in Artworks and Packages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 109.

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mate Robert Rauschenberg would include a photograph of a petrified dog from Pompeii in his important early combine Small Rebus (1956, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles).

13  Stephen Polcari reads the work as “part of a long Romantic tradition . . . the quest to honor, and sometimes, to expiate, the dead, especially the war dead.” Stephen Polcari, “Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk,” Art Journal (Winter 1994): 48. Polcari mainly relies on suggestive correspondences to make his argument. John and Dominique de Menil dedicated their version of the Broken Obelisk to Martin Luther King Jr.

26  Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” reprinted in Other Criteria, 30.

Zweite, Barnett Newman: Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper, states that Newman understood the “pyramid and other Egyptian monuments” to serve as “absolute symbols of inevitability” (286). 14 

15  See “First Man Was an Artist,” in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 156–­59. 16  Albert E. Elsen, The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture from Rodin to 1969 (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1969), 96.

18  Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 207.

Albert Einstein in an interview with Alfred ­Werner, Liberal Judaism 16 (April–­May 1949): 12. 19 

20  Allen Weller, “The Image of Man in Contemporary Art,” in Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture (Urbana-­Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 1959), 19.

22  Leo Steinberg, “Twelve Americans: Part II,” Arts 30 (July 1956); reprinted with slight revisions as “­Torsos and Raoul Hague,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 275, 276.

30  Carol Mancusi-­Ungaro, “A Sum of Corrections,” in Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–­1965, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 237. 31  Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development,” in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1996), 73. 32  Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of the Public,” 14. 33  Jasper Johns quoted in “His Heart Belongs to DADA,” Time, May 4, 1959, 58; reprinted in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 82.

35  Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of the Public,” Other Criteria, 15. 36  James Thrall Soby “The Younger American Artists,” Harper’s Bazaar, September 1947, 194.

Steinberg, “Torsos and Raoul Hague,” 275, 276.

Thomas Hess, “Raoul Hague,” in 12 Americans, ed. Dorothy Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956), 44. 24 

25  Joshua Shannon has outlined the array of the critical reception of Johns’s sculpture, which recognized its relationship to dereliction. Harold Rosenberg, “Jasper Johns: Things the Mind Already Knows,” Vogue, February 1964, 203; Irving Sandler, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Post Magazine, December 22, 1963, 14; Fairfield Porter, “The Education of Jasper Johns,” 62, all cited in Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York and the Rise of the Postmodern City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 57. Anthony Vidler, in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 48, has argued Pompeii, with its mundane and occasionally grubby baseness, “irredeemably confirmed the existence of a ‘dark side’ of classicism.” Johns’s studio

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See Shannon, Disappearance of Objects, 55–­72.

34  The description “pictures that wait” comes from a subheading from the published version of Stenberg’s essay “Contemporary Art and the Plight of the P ­ ublic” when it appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1962, page 38. The subheadings do not appear in the essays republished in Other Criteria, 46.

21  Ben Wolf, “Steel and Iron,” Art Digest 20 (January 15, 1946): 20.

Notes to Chapter One

28  In his 1968 essay “Anti Form,” Robert Morris describes how in works like Target and Flag “what was previously neutral became actual, while what was previously an image became a thing.” In Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 51. 29 

17  Rosalind Krauss, “Objet (Petit) a,” in Helen Molesworth, Part Object, Part Sculpture (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2005), 85. Krauss originally formulated this account in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–­44; reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 276–­90.

23 

27  Leo Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of the Public,” (Harper’s [Spring 1962], based on lectures given at MoMA in Spring 1960), reprinted in Other Criteria, 14, 13.

37  In an interview with Dorothy Seckler, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Grippe recounted how “in 1944, I went to Barney Newman’s studio [and] I saw a painting done by Gottlieb in 1944 which was a copy of my city, an exact copy. And then Gottlieb started his so-­called pictographs in 1945, which was certainly five years or more after I had developed it, you see.” Grippe then recounted how Barnett Newman visited his studio in 1945 and said, “Well, your [works] are very, very important, and we are going to have a show called ‘The Pictograph Movement’ at Betty Parsons’s, and you’re responsible—­you’re . . . responsible for originating this idea, and we’d like you to join the group.” . . . “Of course I didn’t want to join the group in those days. I said, ‘Well, you know, Barney, I’m sorry, but these—­this city series represents about six or seven years, now, of activity. And I am completely removed from it, and I just

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don’t want to [inaudible] pictograph group, because it would be dishonest.’ And so, when I had mentioned this to Barney Newman, that I refused to go into the pictograph movement with him—­with his group, rather—­he was very, very shocked and said, ‘Well, you’re the originator of the pictograph, and you have to be in it.’ And I said no, I was being—­I was now on a new—­working out new concepts and new ideas, and space was a new—­something new for me, and I was experimenting, and that I just couldn’t see my way—­that is I couldn’t see myself going back to symbols and images and pictographs again after leaving it, you know, seven years of it.”

pressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 53 

William Seitz, “Introduction,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 7.

54  “Metal Sculpture: Machine-­Age Art,” Time, A ­ ugust 15, 1955, 55. 55  Roszak interview with James Elliot, February 13, 1956, in Theodore Roszak Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 36. Quoted in Joan Marter, The Drawing of Theodore Roszak (New York: Drawing Society, 1992), 24.

38  Grippe, interview with Dorothy Seckler, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

56  Arthur Miller, “Tortuous Steel Pieces on View,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 1957, x.

39  Howard Devree “A Reviewer’s Notes,” New York Times, November 12, 1944, X8.

57  Martica Sawin, “Theodore Roszak: Craftsman and Visionary,” Arts 31 (November 1956): 18. 58 

40  For a firsthand account of the US government’s efforts to protect European “cultural monuments” during the war, see Owen J. Roberts, Report of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Area (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946).

59  Belle Krasne, “Three Who Carry the Acetylene Torch of Modernism,” Art Digest 25 (April 15, 1951): 15. 60  The poem was published in Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe, “Earth and Tools Rediscovered,” Magazine of Art (January 1951): 22.

41  Peter Grippe, “Enter Mephistopheles, with Images,” ARTnews 59 (October 1960): 43. 42  Untitled statement from 1955. Peter Grippe ­Archives, Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania.

A fallen tower of an exhausted mine; The bridge brought down in the flood; The wartank that burned three days, in the orchard, The twisted gun with which it made a pact; The foglost vessel grinding on the rock; Old wheels and cogs, wire, cable, sides or iron;

43  Peter and Anita Grippe, interview with Anita Gross, 1984, cited in Gross, Peter Grippe (Waltham: MA: Rose Art Museum, 1984), 24–­25. 44  Grippe’s interest in East Indian sculpture is discussed in Anita S. Gross, “The Sculpture of Peter Grippe,” in Peter Grippe (Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, 2006), 7. For a discussion of the relationship between nuclear technology and the fear of a primordial future in postwar art, see Jeffrey Weiss, “Science and Primitivism: A Fearful Symmetry in the Early New York School,” Arts 57 (March 1983): 81–­87. 45 

“New Sculpture Packs a Wallop,” Look, August 1, 1950,

78.

Miller, Time of the Assassins, 116.

On Smith’s photographs of his works in Bolton Landing, see Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two D ­ imensions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 46 

47  C. B. Palmer, “Artic Sentinels,” New York Times, January 5, 1958, BR20. In 1967 the US government inaugurated a vast missile defense system under the name. 48  Lipton, quoted in “Sculpture 1959: Elegant, Brutal, and Witty,” Time, June 15, 1959, 71, 73. 49  Quoted in Emery Grossman, “Seymour Lipton: Pioneer in Metal Sculpture,” Temple Israel Light 10 (September 1963): 6. 50  Seymour Lipton, “Some Notes on My Work,” ­Magazine of Art (November 1947): 264. 51  Quoted in Irving Sandler, An American Sculptor, Seymour Lipton (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 10–­11. 52  For a discussion of the role of the primitive in abstract expressionism, see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Ex-

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These, rusting and brittling, all endure The slow death of metal Used for an iron end, and then abandoned To form a million unmarked monuments going back to earth. To leave a million ghosts in iron, Unremembered matings of a need and a machine; These monuments and ghosts remain, Under a hard and metal moon, Ghosts for our time

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Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 131.

61  Johannes von Moltke, “Ruin Cinema,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 409.

77  Harris Rosenstein, “Ideologue in Lotusland,” ARTnews 65 (October 1966): 38.

62  Willard Kleemann Gallery, David Smith: Sculpture and Drawing (New York: Willard Kleemann, 1952), n.p.

78  Mallary, quoted in Peter Agostini and Robert Mallary with Martin Friedman, “Is Sculpture a Step-­Child? A Colloquy,” 42.

63  Theodore Roszak, In Pursuit of an Image (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1955), 6; reprinted in Theodore Roszak: Sculpture and Drawings, 1942–­1963 (New York: Hirschl and Adler, 1994), 5.

79  “It’s Art—­But Will It Fly?,” Life, April 10, 1964, 46. Lipton noted in an interview soon after the un­veiling of the work: he designed the piece to be tall enough so that it rose near the ceiling of the foyer, so as to “produce a slight feeling of pressure in order to emphasize the feeling of bursting, of growth and release.” Lipton quoted in John Canaday, “An ‘Archangel’ Adorns Philharmonic Hall,” New York Times, February 19, 1964, 36.

64  Theodore Roszak, “Statement” from transcript of the symposium on “The New Sculpture,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 12, 1952, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, 14. 65  Arthur C. Clarke, “The Sentinel” (1951), in The Nine Billion Names of God (New York: Signet, 1967), 234, 237, 239, 240.

80 

66  Newman, “The New Sense of Fate” (1948), in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 169.

CHAPTER TWO: SCULPTURE AND THE WEAPON 1  For a discussion of the historically marginalized status of sculpture, see Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), ix.

67  James Thrall Soby, Introduction to Recent Sculpture USA (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), n.p. 68  See Janay Jadine Wong, “Synagogue Art of the 1950s: A New Context for Abstraction,” Art Journal 53 (Winter 1994): 37–­43.

For this account, see Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000).

2 

“Sculpture 1959: Elegant, Brutal, and Witty,” Time 73, June 15, 1959, 70. 69 

70  William Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 87, 89. 71  Mallary, quoted in Contemporary Urban Visions (New York: New School Art Center, 1964), 11.

73  Mallary, quoted in Peter Agostini and Robert Mallary with Martin Friedman, “Is Sculpture a Step-­Child? A Colloquy,” ARTnews 63 (September 1964): 42, 57. 74  Robert Mallary, “A Self-­Interview,” Location 1 (Spring 1963): 62. “The question is,” he went on, “will we destroy ourselves? Is human intelligence inevitably self-­ destructive? Will the species prove to be an evolutionary dead-­end?” Mallary then alludes to Karl Jaspers’s recent study of the challenge of nuclear weapons, Does Man Have a Future, and proposes the need for nuclear containment among the superpowers. He ends his discussion of this subject stating, “To wipe out all life on earth because of this issue . . . would be the most abominable immorality conceivable. This is one point on which I am myself fanatical.”

76  Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts (September 1964); reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–­1975: Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints (Halifax: Press of the Nova

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See, for instance, Robert Goldwater, What Is Modern Sculpture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969) and Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977).

3 

Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 318, 316, 319. As late as 1961 when the critic revised the essay of “The New Sculpture” for publication in his anthology Art and Culture, he declared that sculpture had begun to “make itself felt as the most representative, even if not the most fertile, visual art of our time.”

4 

72  Mallary, quoted in Contemporary Urban ­Visions, 11; “Art Crashes through the Junk Pile,” Life, April 24, 1961, 65.

75  “Art Hunting in Darkest World Fair,” ARTnews 63 (Summer 1964): 35. For a discussion of the artistic program on the Theaterama Building, see Michael Lobel, James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics, and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 97–­121.

“Art Hunting in Darkest World’s Fair,” 36.

Smith, in Herman Cherry, “David Smith,” Numero 3 (May–­June 1953); reprinted in Sam Hunter, David Smith (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1957), 7. David Smith, “Notes for Elaine de Kooning” (1951), in Susan J. Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 128.

5 

David Smith, “The New Sculpture,” in Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 150. Greenberg would similarly celebrate the new sculpture’s lack of “historical associations” in his essay on “The New Sculpture,” in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:318.

6 

Sarah Hamill, “Against the Age of Grace: David Smith’s 1960s Nudes,” in David Smith Points of P ­ ower (Zurich: Galerie Gmurzynska, 2012), 163.

7 

David Smith, “The New Sculpture,” in Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 150. Greenberg would similarly celebrate the new sculpture’s

8 

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lack of “historical associations” in his essay on “The New Sculpture,” in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:318. Smith elaborated on what he called the “Chinese attitude of cloud-­longing” in his statement in the New Sculpture symposium at MoMA in which he notes how ­ ainter Chinapin spoke about how orchid leaves “droop the p toward the Earth, they all long, to point to the sky.” Gratz, “Steel Sculpture at Willard and Buchholz Galleries,” Architectural Forum 84 (February 1946): 146.

9 

10  Clement Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5–­22. For Clark’s conception of vulgarity, see “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 371–­403. Following a line of interpretation surrounding the New York school most famously articulated by Meyer Schapiro in his 1957 essay “The Liberating Quality of the Avant-­Garde,” one could argue that it was the apparent brutality of these industrial forms that revealed their social and ethical limitations and the subsequent necessity of the creative individual in a technocratic society. Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of the Avant-­Garde,” ARTnews 56 (Summer 1957): 36–­42. In fact the artist and critic Fairfield Porter would make a similar case specifically in relation to Smith the same year, writing that in his work “labor is made into art” so that “art is the solution for the worker’s alienation from himself that his labor causes.” Fairfield Porter, “David Smith: Steel into Sculpture,” ARTnews 56 (September 1957): 54.

19  John Stephan, “Sculpture and the Weapon,” Tiger’s Eye 4 (June 1948): 107. 20  Isamu Noguchi, “The Ideas of Art,” Tiger’s Eye 4 (June 1948): 81. 21  Robert Goldwater, “David Hare,” Art in America 44 (Winter 1956/57); reprinted in Three American Sculptors (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 35. 22  David Smith, “Autobiographical Notes” (1950), in Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 106. 23  H. H. Arnason, Theodore Roszak (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1956), 14; Richard Stankiewicz interview by Richard Brown Baker, 1963, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, quoted in Miracle in the Scrap Heap: The Sculpture of Richard Stankiewicz (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery, 2003), 14. 24  David Smith, “Notes for Elaine De Kooning” (1951), in Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 129.

David Smith, “Culture and the Ideal of Perfection” (excerpt from notebook 1959), in Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 306.

25  For instance, one can think of the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or, as Fredric Jameson has shown, the “steel mesh” like roots of the invented “ponic plants” in Brian Aldiss’s 1958 novel Starship. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 258.

For a sustained analysis of Smith’s imagery in his series of Spectres, see David McCarthy, “David Smith’s Spectres of War and Peace,” Art Journal 69 (Fall 2010): 20–­39. On the cannon motif, see Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of ­David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 56–­67. 12 

26  Claes Oldenburg, “New Haven: May to December 1969,” in Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side, 1956–­1969, ed. Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg, and Barbara Schröder (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 327. In a text from 1959 published in the same volume, the artist describes the Ray Gun motif as equally antiwar, writing that “it should be written all over town like Stop War” (86).

13  On the contemporary oblivion of postwar sculpture, see Meghan Bissonnette, “From ‘The New Sculpture’ to Garden Statuary: The Suppression of Abstract Expressionist Sculpture,” Journal of Art Historiography 13 (December 2015): 1–­19. 14  Carter Ratcliff, “Domesticated Nightmare,” Art in America (May 1985): 146. The relation with science fiction of the period has been noted by a variety of scholars. Lisa Phillips notes the relationship between these sculptors’ interest in monstrous avian forms and Japanese science fiction movies in the catalog for The Third Dimension (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984).

For a cursory but compelling consideration of the relationship between Smith’s art and science fiction, see Perry Meisel, The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan (London: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2010), 54. 16  Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 345. Jameson argues that it would be a mis-

17  While the novels of Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard and films like Them and The Day the Earth Stood Still have garnered some serious academic consideration from scholars of literature and cinema in the past decade, very few contemporary art historians have engaged with the work of these sculptors. 18  Picasso, quoted in André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, trans. June Guicharnaud (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 11.

11 

15 

take “to make the ‘apologia’ for SF in terms of specifically ‘high’ literary values—­to try, in other words, to recuperate this or that major text as exceptional” (283).

27  The artist acknowledged the influence of “airplanes” and “jets” in an interview with Tony Towle, “Two Conversations with Lee Bontecou,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 2 (May–­ June 1971): 26. 28  V. P., “Reviews and Previews,” ARTnews 60 (­September 1961): 16. 29  Elizabeth A. T. Smith, “All Freedom in Every Sense,” in Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective (Los Angeles: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 173. 30  “Lee Bontecou, Untitled,” Cleveland Museum of Art Bulletin 56 (February 1969): 80: “The image is complex, threatening, impure, and dangerous”; Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts (December 1960); reprinted in Complete

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Writings, 1959–­1975, 27. Judd also states that ”these are threatening concrete holes to be among.”

44 

31  Lee Bontecou, statement, in Dorothy Miller, Americans 1963 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963), 12. 32  Michel Ragon, in The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration, and Urbanism, trans. Alan Sheridan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 100, notes the relationship between artillery shells being used for World War I monuments and the readymade both signaling “the introduction of industrial objects into public art.” 33  S. Lane Faison, New Sculpture by Herbert Ferber (New York: Kootz Gallery, 1957), n.p.

David Smith, letter to Marian Willard (February 1948), David Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, quoted in Hamill, “Against the Age of Grace: David Smith’s 1960s Nudes,” 58. 34 

35  Smith describes his interest in the “end view” of his work in an unpublished manuscript from 1952: “I Have Seen Some Critics,” in Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 160; David Smith, letter to Marian Willard (February 1948). Manuscript Archives, Estate of David Smith, New York; cited in Sarah Hamill, “What Sculpture Can Never Be: The Photographs of David Smith,” in David Smith Invents, ed. Susan Behrends Franks (Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, 2011), 73; Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 3. 36  Edward Fry, David Smith: Painter, Sculptor, Draftsman (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1982), 50; Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Rosalind Krauss has noted the “artillery-­like character” of Smith’s series of Zigs. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 169. 37  “Ground Strafing: Paintings Show What U.S. ­Fliers See during Low-­Altitude Attacks,” Life, July 30, 1945, 54–­56.

Smith, in Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, 172.

41  Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (New York: Praeger, 1964), 253, 250. 42  For a good overview of the “latent anthropomorphism” of modern sculpture, see David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 5–­19. 43  Emily Genauer, “Sculpture by Moderns on Display,” New York Herald Tribune, February 1, 1953; reprinted in David Smith: A Centennial (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2006), 356; Howard Griffin, “Totems in Steel,” ARTnews 55 (October 1956): 34; I[rving] H. S[andler], “Reviews and Previews,” ARTnews 56 (February 1958): 10.

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46  Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, “Seymour Lipton,” Art in America 44 (Winter 1956/57): 17. 47  “Sculpture 1959: Elegant, Brutal, and Witty,” Time, June 15, 1959, 70. 48  See Thomas Hine, Populux (New York: MJF Books, 1986), 124–­29. 49  John McHale, R. Buckminster Fuller (New York: George Braziller, 1962), 25. 50  Stuart Preston, “Diverse Moderns,” New York Times, February 1, 1953, X8; reprinted in David Smith: A Centennial, 356. 51  Buckminster Fuller, “New Directions 3: Buckminster Fuller,” Perspecta 1 (Summer 1952): 30. This house, although a commercial failure (only 3,700 models were purchased), laid the groundwork for Fuller’s geodesic domes (and arguably suggest the martial and aerial connotations of the geodesic domes). 52  Emmie Donadio argues that Warrior is a parodic response to Smith’s Tanktotems and that Stankiewicz “subverted any opportunity to invest his works with a totemic power or an aura of military authority.” In Emmie Donadio, Miracle in the Scrap Heap: The Sculpture of Richard Stankiewicz, 27.

54  Dorothy Adler, “Roszak and His Weldings,” Christian Science Monitor, May 1, 1962, 4; Belle Krasne, “Those Who Carry the Acetylene Torch of Modernism,” Art Digest 25 (April 15, 1951): 15.

39  Michael Kirby, “Sculpture as a Visual Instrument,” Art International 12 (October 1968): 35–­37.

Notes to Chapter Two

45  Interview with Harlan Phillips, 1963, Theodore Roszak Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. “I discovered how my introduction to the first basic conduct of nature is right here before me, because when you melt the m ­ etal and it’s in a liquid state, it begins to take on a kind of shape and form right under your eyes that is almost like a cauldron that must be inside the earth itself. . . . The metal is flowing all sorts of ways, and it is shaping and moving, and it’s like a living thing.” Quoted in Joan Marter, The Drawing of Theodore Roszak (New York: Drawing Society, 1992), 20.

53  Fairfield Porter, “David Smith: Steel into Sculpture,” ARTnews 56 (September 1957): 42.

38  Carter Ratcliff, in Lee Bontecou (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1972), n.p.

40 

E. B., “Richard Hunt,” ARTnews 57 (November 1958):

19.

55  Roszak interview with James Welliot, February 13, 1956, in Theodore Roszak Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 36. Quoted in Marter, Drawing of Theodore Roszak, 21. “It has to do with the large concept of flight and the way in which it affected the whole legend that has now become part of the American scene, regarding the Wright brothers’ trial at Kitty Hawk. . . . The whole idea here is that the aircraft has been used in a very destructive way and it recalled the superior dominance of the pterodactyl that at one time was also the scourge of the air and the earth and is a kind of reincarnation of its evil intent, so therefore its visitation at Kitty Hawk was the embodiment again of the aircraft assuming the role of the pterodactyl . . . this visitation of

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Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 42.

force back to the same origin of flight, excepting that this was in terms of man-­made possibilities rather than in the natural evolution of the species.” The artist claimed the form suggests “the mantle, drape of veil, which are symbolic of both honor and humility.” Theodor Roszak, “Invocation,” in Visions of Man in Ten Aluminum Sculptures (Richmond, VA: Reynolds Metal, 1966), n.p. 56 

75  Ben Wolf, “Steel and Iron,” Art Digest (January 15, 1946): 20; Fairfield Porter, “David Smith: Steel into Sculpture,” ARTnews 56 (September 1957): 42. 76  Smith, “The New Sculpture” (1952), in Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 149.

57  “Will This Art Endure?,” New York Times Magazine, December 1, 1957, 48.

77  Allen S. Weller, “Talking about Art,” in Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture (Urbana: University of Illinois, Krannert Art Museum, 1953), 13.

58  Interview with Harlan Phillips, 1963, 404–­5. Theodor Roszak Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

78  Doris Brian, “Abstraction Wins, Other Styles Show at the Whitney,” Art Digest (April 15, 1950): 9.

59  Philip K. Dick, “Pessimism in Science Fiction” (1955), in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 54, 55. 60  For a discussion of this tradition, see Finbarr Barry Flood, “Image against Nature: Spolia as Apo­tropaia in Byzantium and the dar al-­Islam,” M ­ edieval History Journal 9 (2006): 143–­66. 61 

79  “We were at war then, you know, the earth was being bombarded and torn up by bombing, just like Vietnam, in this piece I conceive of the Earth as tortured by these bombardments.” Quoted in Martin Friedman, Noguchi’s Imaginary Landscapes (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1978), 43. 80 

In Noguchi’s Imaginary Landscapes, 45.

Ralph Steiner, PM (May 31, 1942), as quoted in Christopher Phillips, “Steichen’s Road to Victory,” Exposure 18 (1981): 38. See also Elizabeth McCausland, “Photographs Illustrate Our ‘Road to Victory,’ ” Photonotes (June 1942): 3. 81 

Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, 126.

62  “Metal Sculpture: Machine-­Age Art,” Time, A ­ ugust 15, 1955, 52. 63  Frank O’Hara, “David Smith: Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing,” transcript from an interview from November 6, 1964, which appeared in the film the Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing. Reprinted in Sarah Hamill, David Smith: Works, Writings, and Interviews (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2011), 153.

82  MoMA Bulletin 11 (August 1943): 22. Quoted in Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 227.

64  Henry McBride, “Roszak’s Moral Lesson,” ARTnews 50 (May 1951): 46. 65  Sam Hunter, in his essay for a 1957 retrospective exhibition at MoMA, described this work as “a rambling fanciful inventory of the life of a fellow-­welder: the vanities of his wife are the subject of a moralizing relief passage in which she is transformed into a M ­ edusa,” in David Smith (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1957), 9.

83  Eric Sandeen, in Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 74, suggests that the removal of the bomb from the book version of the exhibition was due to the fact that Steichen “avoided constricting a representation of fundamental annihilation to the rectangular confines of a book layout in which it could be compared to other images.” In other words, something about the bomb image required a spatial component.

1961): 16.

84  The reviewer for Popular Photography described the exhibition display as evoking “the feeling of having stepped into the Grand Canyon or the Carlsbad Caverns or something equally monumental.” Popular Photography, May 1955, 88–­89.

68  Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts (January 1963); reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–­1975, 65.

24.

66 

“What Wins a Prize,” Time, January 21, 1957, 54.

67  V. P., “Reviews and Previews,” ARTnews 60 (­September

69  Donald Judd, “Lee Bontecou,” in Complete Writings, 1959–­1975, 179. 70  I[rving] H. S[andler], “Reviews and Previews,” ARTnews 56 (February 1958): 11. 71  Howard Griffin, “Totems in Steel,” ARTnews 55 (October 1956): 65. 72 

Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two Dimensions, 94.

Smith, “The New Sculpture” (1952), in Cooke, David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews, 148. 73 

74 

David Smith, “The Question—­what is your hope,” in

85 

86  On the image of the “Whole Earth,” see Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture,” American Historical Review 116 (June 2011): 602–­30. 87  Roszak, The New Sculpture, 15; Lippold, The New Sculpture, 32–­33. In his introductory remarks, A. C. Ritchie noted the “noticeable revival of sculpture since the war and a corresponding revival of interest on the part of the public” (1). 88  “Metal Sculpture: Machine-­Age Art,” Time, A ­ ugust 15, 1955, 55. 89  “Richard Lippold, ‘Sculpture,’ ” Magazine of Art 44 (December 1951): 318.

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Theodore Roszak, The New Sculpture, MoMA Archives,

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90 

Lippold, quoted in “Metal Sculpture: Machine-­Age Art,”

55. 91  Lippold, “Sculpture in Space,” transcript of address given before the Arts Club of Chicago, February 3, 1953, 6. Lippold Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 92  Richard Lippold, “Space Man,” Newsweek, January 29, 1968, 82–­83; Richard Lippold, “Sculpting with Wire and Flame,” Design (March 1961): 174. 93  Jack Burnham, “Richard Lippold: Shaping Space with Reflected Light,” in Richard Lippold Sculpture (Milwaukee: Haggerty Museum of Art, 1990), 24.

reinstalled in 1950 at the Museo dell’Opera. Many of the sculptures from the Duomo were stored at the Oratory of San Onofrio at Dicomano. The allies bombed Florence on September 24, 1943, and then again in February and March 1944, targeting the rail center. See Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–­1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 533; Robert Edsel, Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 105; and Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Knopf, 1994), 251. Ferber in 15 Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952), 10.

106 

Ferber, “Sculpture as Environment,” in Herbert Ferber Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

94  Richard Lippold, transcript to “Nearer to Thee.” Lippold Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

107 

95  Alfred Barr, quoted in Frederick Kiesler Galaxies, quoted in Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), 120; “Meant to Be Lived In,” Life, May 26, 1952, 80.

108 

96  Kiesler, in 15 Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952), 8; Kiesler, “Second Manifesto of Correalism,” Art International 9 (March 1965): 27, in Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, 83.

Herbert Ferber, “On Sculpture,” Art in America 42 (December 1954): 262, 263, 265. For a contemporaneous analysis of Ferber’s conception of centrifugal and centripetal space, see Otis Gage, “ART: Sculpturama,” in Arts and Architecture 72, no. 2 (February 1955): 4–­10, 30. My thanks to Marin Sullivan for pointing me to this reference. Dorothy Seckler interview with Herbert Ferber, Archives of American Art, 1962, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

109 

97  Lawrence Campbell, “Lassaw Makes a Sculpture,” ARTnews 53 (March 1954): 25.

110 

E. C. Goosen “Herbert Ferber,” in Goosen, Goldwater, and Sander, Three American Sculptors, 12, 16.

98  Peter Grippe, “Enter Mephistopheles,” ARTnews 59 (October 1960): 44.

111 

99  Irving Sandler, “Ibram Lassaw,” in Three Ameri­can Sculptors: Ferber, Hare, Lassaw, by E. C. G ­ oosen, R. Goldwater, and I. Sander (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 48.

112 

100 

Ibram Lassaw, “Perspectives and Reflections of a Sculptor: A Memoir,” Leonardo 1 (October 1968): 354.

113 

Lawrence Campbell, “Lassaw Makes a Sculpture,” ARTnews 53 (March 1954): 67. Denise Lassaw notes that as a boy her father “read science fiction and dreamed of becoming an airplane pilot.” See “Ibram Lassaw’s Life and Art: A Personal Account,” in Ibram Lassaw: Deep Space and Beyond (Redford, VA: Redford University Foundation Press, 2002), 5.

114 

John I. H. Baur, A Sculpture by Herbert Ferber: To Create an Environment (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1961), n.p.

101 

“Metal Sculpture: Machine-­Age Art,” Time, ­August 15, 1955; Carola Giedion-­Welcker, Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space (New York: George Wittenborn, 1955), xxiv, 55; Eleanor Munro, “Exploration in Forms,” Perspectives USA 16 (Summer 1956): 160.

102 

Herbert Ferber, “The Ides of Art,” Tiger’s Eye 2 (December 1947): 75.

103 

Herbert Ferber, “On Sculpture,” Art in America 42 (December 1954): 307.

104 

In his 1962 interview with Dorothy Seckler, he identifies the sculptures as the prophets by Donatello. Ferber claims that they “had been brought down from the Campanile in Florence during the war.” Ferber was in Europe in 1938 and then again in 1948 between August and October. The statues were removed from their niches in 1940 and

105 

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“The Ides of Art,” Tiger’s Eye 2 (December 1947): 44.

John Canaday, “Work by Herbert Ferber at Whitney Aims to ‘Create an Environment,’ ” New York Times, March 10, 1961, 24. A similar critique was mounted by E. G. in “Ferber’s Sculpture: The Uneasy Embrace,” New York Herald Tribune, March 12, 1961, D17. Harold Clurman, “Night Life and Day Light,” Tomorrow 5 (April 1946); reprinted in David Smith: A Centennial, 354. Seymour Lipton, note, March 11, 1960, in Lipton Archives, Archives of American Art, Box 3.

115 

Allen Weller, “Talking about Art,” in Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1953), 9, 11.

116 

Allen S. Weller, Art: USA: Now (New York: Viking, 1962), 13.

117 

Herbert Read, “New Aspects of British Sculpture,” in Exhibition of Works by Sutherland, Wads­worth, Adams, Armitage, Butler, Chadwick, Clarke, Meadows, Moore, Paolozzi, Turnbull (London: British Council, 1952), n.p.; Jean Paul Sartre, “The Search for the Absolute,” in Alberto Giacometti: Exhibition of Sculptures (New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1948), 6.

118 

James Fitzsimmons, “Space and the Image in Art,” Quadrum 6 (1959): 71.

119 

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Pantheon, 1983, 133–­34), repeatedly in these movies the emptiness and expansiveness of the sky represented “the negation of culture,” while the often cramped enclosures of spaceships and stations symbolized the safety of culture.

Greenberg, “Abstract, Representational,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 3:191. In an interview with Seckler from 1962, Ferber acknowledges this connection: “by making [their paintings] large they emphasized their position in space. . . . They created an environment by making a picture fifteen feet long and ten feet high.”

120 

Greenberg, “Our Period Style,” Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:324.

121 

Greenberg, “Our Period Style,” Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:323.

122 

Benjamin Buchloh has argued that the emergence of phenomenological approaches to postwar sculpture was prompted by the “discovery” of such modes of thought in the 1960s. “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture,” in Neo-­Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 1–­40. Note the common reading of minimalism as making the situation part of the aesthetic experience, its environmental aspect. See, for instance, Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), 82; James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 153–­66.

123 

Clement Greenberg, “Our Period Style,” in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:326; Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 6, 10; Barbara Rose, “Sculpture: Intimacy and Perception,” 14 Sculptors (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1969), 8.

124 

Lucy Lippard, “Reviews: New York,” Artforum 2 (March 1964): 18.

125 

CHAPTER THREE: NEW MONUMENTS AND REVERSED RUINS 1  Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 278, 280. Krauss discusses her designation of the monument as the crucial paradigm for her analysis of sculpture in a roundtable discussion, “The Expanded Field Then,” in Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture, ed. Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 9. In the “The Expanded Field Then,” 30, roundtable, Hal Foster notes that Krauss’s “structural mapping is resistant to the temporal dimension” of the ­monument.

2 

For instance, many critics described David Smith’s large-­scaled Cubi series in terms of monumentality. On the Cubi series see, for instance, Hilton Kramer, David Smith: A Memorial Exhibition (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1965), 7: “The imperious scale of these constructions . . . require a large, open-­air stage—­a truly monumental space.” Gene Baro, “David Smith, 1906–­1965,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 100: “This newest work . . . is monumental and architectural.” Nigel Gosling, “Making Sculpture Out of Steel,” Observer (London), August 21, 1966, 16: “They dominate their surroundings like monuments.” The title of Robert Coates’s review of the memorial exhibition of Smith’s work at the Fogg Museum is “The Art Galleries: Monument,” New Yorker, October 22, 1966, 93–­96.

3 

126 

Kynaston McShine, “Primary Structures,” in Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966), n.p.

4 

127 

Flavin, interview with Phyllis Tuchman, in Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, ed. Tiffany Bell and Michael Govan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 192.

5 

128 

Dan Flavin, “in daylight or cool white: an autobiographical sketch,” Artforum 4 (December 1965): 24.

6 

Eleanor Green, Scale as Content (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1967), n.p.

7 

For a good overview of the Jefferson Memorial, see Tracy Campbell, The Gateway Arch: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). International Sculpture Competition: The Unknown Political Prisoner (London: Tate Gallery, 1953).

129 

“Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum 5 (December 1966): 19.

130 

Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (June 1967); reprinted in Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 172n.

131 

Public Papers of the President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, 1040. The final words if the 1951 sci-­fi movie The Thing from Another World are “watch the skies everywhere, keep looking, keep watching the skies.” As Peter Biskind notes in his informative study of 1950s science fiction cinema, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York:

132 

Andrew M. Shanken, “Planning Memory: Living Memorials in the United States during World War II,” Art Bulletin 84 (March 2002): 135.

On the competition for the monument, see Robert Burstow, “The Limits of Modernist Art as a ‘Weapon of the Cold War’: Reassessing the Unknown Patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner,” Oxford Art Journal 20 (1997): 68–­80.

8 

For a discussion on the pervasiveness of monumentality in mid-­1960s critical discourse, especially as it related to sculpture’s relation to architecture, see Julian Rose, “Objects in the Cluttered Field: Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monuments,” October 140 (Spring 2012): 113–­38.

9 

10  On the concept of site-­specificity and its origins in postwar sculptural practices, see Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-­Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 11–­55.

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Shanken, “Planning Memory,” 140.

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Festival, 1967), n.p. Oldenburg in Rose, Object into Mon­ ument, 61. Suzaan Boettger, in Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 3, argues that “a widespread institutionalization of large-­scale art in the early 1960s as enhancements for offices and public spaces” prefigures earth art.

11  Kynaston McShine, Primary Structures (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966), n.p. 12  “The quality of publicness is attached in proportion as the size increases in relation to oneself. . . . Things on the monumental scale, then, include more terms necessary for their apprehension than objects smaller than the body.” Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2” Artforum 5 (October 1966); reprinted in Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 11–­13.

27 

28  Oldenburg, quoted in Robert Dallos, “Grave Work: Digging Invisible Pop Art,” Toronto Globe and Mail, October 2, 1967, 1.

13  For a discussion of the work’s allusion to weaponry, see Alex Potts, “Dan Flavin, ‘in cool white’ and ‘infected with a blank magic,’ in Dan Flavin: New Light, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 6. 14 

29  Rose, Object into Monument, 61. “I grew up in the area and loved it as a child . . . the site, the area that I had chosen, was very close to the obelisk Cleopatra’s Needle, which I remember from childhood—­I used to play there. I thought that was a great monument. So I figured: Why should I put up a monument when that one is already there?” Cited in Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, 17.

Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: Ecco, 2010), 127.

Jill Johnson, “Reviews and Previews,” ARTnews 63 (January 1965): 13. 15 

16  Oldenburg, quoted in Gene Baro, Claes Oldenburg: Drawing and Prints (London: Chelsea House, 1969), 156.

Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side, 298; cited in Rose, Object into Monument, 62.

30 

17  Lucy Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” Art Inter­ national (November 1966): 28; Elizabeth C. Baker, “Judd the Obscure,” ARTnews 67 (April 68): 45; John Perreault, “Plastic Ambiguities,” Village Voice, March 7, 1968, 20. 18 

31  Oldenburg, in Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side, 255. 32  Herbert Marcuse, “Commenting on Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monuments for New York City,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 12 (1969): 75–­76. For a discussion of Marcuse’s essay, see Tom Williams, “Lipstick Ascending Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969,” Grey Room 31 (Spring 2008): 116–­44.

Neil Welliver, “Monumentality,” Perspecta 11 (1967): 30.

19  Oldenburg, quoted in Barbara Rose, Object into Monu­ ment (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Center, 1971), 17. 20 

Oldenburg, quoted in Rose, Object into Monument, 17.

Paul Carroll, “The Poetry of Scale: Interview with Claes Oldenburg,” in Claes Oldenburg, Proposals for Monuments and Buildings (Chicago: Big Table Publishing, 1969), 25. 21 

22  Dan Graham, “Oldenburg’s Monuments,” Artforum 6 (January 1968): 35.

Dan Flavin, in his “autobiographic sketch,” “in daylight or cool white,” Artforum 4 (December 1965): 24, describes his “epiphany” when he hung a gold fluorescent tube diagonally, writing that “the radiant tube and the shadow cast by its supporting pan seemed ironic enough to hold alone.” In a 1972 statement “on the ‘monuments’ . . .” he writes that “the pseudo-­monuments, structural designs for clear but temporary cool white fl[u]orescent lighting, were to honor the artist ironically.” Quoted in “Monuments” for V. Tatlin from Dan Flavin, 1964–­1982 (Chicago: Donald Young Gallery, 1989), n.p. Claes Oldenburg, in Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side, 1956–­1969, ed. Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg, and Barbara Schröder (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 298.

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34  Press release for “Monuments, Tombstones, and Trophies,” 1967, Museum of Contemporary Craft Archives.

36  Judd, quoted in David Bourdon, “Immodest Proposals for Monuments,” New York World Journal, January 8, 1967, 22.

24 

26  Irving Sandler, “Public Art #1,” in Sculpture in En­ vironment (New York: New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs for the Cultural Showcase

33  Oldenburg, in Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side, 259.

35  Ada Louise Huxtable, “Monumental Questions,” New York Times, March 26, 1967, 24D.

23  Dan Graham, “New York: Of Monuments and Dreams,” Art and Artists 1 (March 1967): 63; Dan Graham, “Subject Matter” (1969), in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects 1965–­1990, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 51n.

25 

Oldenburg in Rose, Object into Monument, 60.

37  Dan Graham, “Models and Monuments,” Arts 41 (March 1967): 33. 38  Dan Graham, “Monuments,” unpublished typescript, American Craft Council Archives, 38, 45. Sections of this essay appeared in modified form in his essay “Oldenburg’s Monuments.” 39 

Graham, “Monuments,” 38, 45.

Dan Graham, “Oldenburg’s Monuments,” Artforum 6 (January 1968): 37. 40 

41  Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 15, 10, 11. 42  Mark Wigley, “The Architectural Cult of Synchronization,” October 94 (Fall 2000): 31–­61. 43  Robert Smithson, “An Interview” (March 20, 1968), RES 63/64 (Spring/Autumn 2013): 296–­97.

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44 

Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 11.

61  Mel Bochner, “Art in Process,” Arts 40 (September/ October 1966); reprinted in Solar System and Restrooms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 39.

Julian Rose, “Objects in the Cluttered Field: Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monuments,” October 140 (Spring 2012): 131. 45 

62  Max Kozloff, “9 in a Warehouse,” Artforum 7 (February 1969): 38. Kozloff would in fact describe the works in terms of conventional ruination, stating that the “artificial, man-­ made object . . . returns to nature, obeys physics.”

Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 276–­80. 46 

47  Dan Flavin, “Some Remarks,” Artforum (December 1965): 27; Flavin, quoted in Christopher Andreae, “Flavin’s Self-­Sufficient Light,” Christian Science Monitor, February 14, 1970; reprinted in Paula Feld­man and Karsten Schubert, eds., It Is What It Is: Writings on Dan Flavin since 1964 (London: Ridinghouse, 2004), 103.

63  On the allusions to collective labor in Serra’s prop pieces, see Hal Foster, Richard Serra: Early Work (New York: David Zwirner, 2014).

48  Barbara Rose, “New York Letter,” Art International 8 (Summer 1964): 80. 49  Smithson, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 249.

John Perreault, “Nonsites in the News,” New York, February 24, 1969, 45. 50 

51  Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 12, 13. A different sort of futurological interpretation of the “glass boxes” on Park Avenue was articulated by Lewis Mumford, who, in a 1952 review of the Lever House published in the New Yorker, described the “fragile” building as seeming “undaunted by the threat of being melted into a puddle by an atomic bomb,” and thus serving as “an implicit symbol of hope for a peaceful world.” In Mumford, From the Ground Up: Observations on Contemporary Architecture, Housing, Highway Building, and Civic Design (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1956), 165. 52  Robert Musil, “Monuments” (1927), in Selected Writings, ed. Burton Pike (New York: Continuum, 1986), 321, 322, 323. 53  For the relationship between minimalism and so-­called good design, see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 211–­21. 54  Dan Graham “Homes for America,” Arts 41 (­December 1966–­January 1967): 22. 55  Dan Graham, “New York: Of Monuments and Dreams,” Art and Artists 1 (March 1967): 63. 56  For a comprehensive account of Matta-­Clark’s practice, see Thomas Crow, “Gordon Matta-­Clark,” in Gordon Matta-­ Clark, ed. Corinne Diserens (London: Phaidon, 2003), 7–­132. 57  Dan Graham, “Gordon Matta-­Clark,” in Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects, 1965–­1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 199, 201. 58  Carl Andre, in Art in Process 4 (New York: Finch College Museum of Art, 1969), n.p. 59  R[obert] G[oldwater], “Reviews and Previews,” ARTnews 51 (April 1952): 43; James Fitzsimmons, “Space and the Image in Art,” Quadrum 6 (1959): 73. 60 

Graham, “Subject Matter” (1969), in Rock My Religion,

40.

64  Elizabeth Baker, “Critic’s Choice: Serra,” ARTnews 68 (February 1970): 26. Baker’s description would be darkly fulfilled the following year when, in November 1971, Raymond Johnson, an art installer at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, was killed when a two-­ton steel plate from one of Serra’s prop pieces fell on top of him. 65 

Nicolas Calas, “Documentizing,” Arts 45 (May 1970): 31.

66 

Baker, “Critic’s Choice: Serra,” 26.

67  Jennifer Roberts, Mirror-­Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 9. Roberts’s book offers a considerable revision of the postmodern understanding of Smithson in which the artist’s interest in entropy has typically been understood primarily in the art historical terms of style and morphology so that his work is seen as a stark disavowal of the sort of humanist expressionism and its related ethos into formal composition and coherency that largely defined postwar art of the 1950s. For a definitive postmodern reading of Smithson’s engagement with entropy, see Rosalind Krauss’s entry for “Entropy,” in Yve Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 73–­78. 68  Robert Smithson, “Interstellar Flit,” undated typescript, Robert Smithson/Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, reel 3834, cited in Reinhold Martin, “Organicism’s Other,” in Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, ed. Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 190. The artist would include a passage from Wiener’s book in his 1966 essay “Quasi-­Infinities and Waning of Space.” In a 1973 interview, Smithson would cite the book’s description of entropy as a “Manichean devil” that makes no distinction between the beneficial and destructive forces of technological progress. Smithson, interview with Alison Sky, in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 302. 69  On the predictive function of cybernetics, see Richard Poirier, “Escape to the Future,” in The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 187–­203. 70  For a good overview of Wiener’s wartime work, see Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 103–­10; and Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 228–­66.

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71  Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 26. 72 

(February–­April 1969); reprinted in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 116, 117. 92  Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 52, 58.

Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 95, 46–­47.

73  Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Cities of America,” Figaro (April 1945); reprinted in Jean-­Paul Sartre, Situations III, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Seagull Books, 2008), 113, 114.

93  My thinking on Smithson’s Pine Barrens nonsite is indebted to D. Jacob Rabinowitz, “Grit in the Machine: Robert Smithson’s First Nonsite and (Contemporary) History,” unpublished graduate seminar paper, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2011.

74  Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 72, 73. 75 

Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” 73.

76 

Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” 74.

77  Smithson, interview with Grégoire Müller, in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 256. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 413, 414. Smithson mentions “entropology” in two interviews, in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 257, 299. For Fuller on antientropy, see Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York; Bantam, 1969), 9, 15, 344.

94  Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 56, 244, 146. Indeed, as McPhee notes, even the existence of the Pine Barrens was artificial as it was caused by manmade forest fires to promote pine and cedar growth. 95  This facet of the work is discussed in Kelly Baum, New Jersey as Non-­Site (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), 35–­36, 54n.

78  Lytle Shaw, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 39.

96  “Tony Smith writes about ‘a dark pavement’ that is ‘punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights,’ ” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 59. For the role of New Jersey in Smithson’s practice, see Phyllis Tuchman, Robert Smithson and New Jersey (Montclair, NJ: Montclair Museum of Art, 2014), and Baum, New Jersey as Non-­Site.

79  Bob Dylan, “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” 1971; Smithson, “Interview with Paul Cummings,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 293.

97  Roberts, Mirror-­Travels, 101. On the history of the navy base at Bayonne, see Tuchman, Robert Smithson and New Jersey, 29–­30.

80  Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 316.

98  Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 178.

81 

Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” 72.

82 

Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” 72.

On Smithson’s engagement with science fiction, see Rory O’Dea, “Science Fiction and Mystic Fact: Robert Smithson’s Ways of World-­Making,” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2013).

100 

Peter Hutchinson, “Is There Life on Earth,” Art in America 54 (November–­December 1966): 69. 83 

84 

Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” 72.

101 

Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” trans. David Kettler, in Georg Simmel 1858–­1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 259, 260. 85 

87  Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay: Ruins, Relic, Symbol, Ornament (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1968), 3. 88  Smithson, in Moira Roth, “An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973),” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 92.

90  Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” Artforum 5 (November 1966): 18–­27; reprinted as “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” in Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 77–­99. 91 

Smithson, “Aerial Art,” Studio International

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Brian Aldiss, Earthworks (New York: Signet, 1965), 20.

An exception is Richard Williams, who argues in After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe, 1965–­1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 68, that Smithson’s understanding of the concept of de-­differentiation (as it was articulated by Anton Ehrenzweig) was inspired by the threat of nuclear annihilation of the world. “Ehrenzweig’s book,” he claims, “is transformed from an argument about artistic perception, to an argument about how one begins to represent nuclear destruction.”

102 

86  Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 58.

89  Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 111.

99  Nina Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth-­Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 13, 3, 1.

Carl Andre, quoted in Carl Andre (The Hague: Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1969), 38; Grégoire Müller, “Michael Heizer,” Arts 44 (December 1969/January 1970): 42; Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12 (February 1968): 31–­36. One notable recent exception to the apolitical analysis of earth art is Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013).

103 

Lawrence Alloway, “Site Inspection,” Artforum 15 (October 1976): 51.

104 

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105 

David Bourdon, “Down to Earth Sculpture,” Life, April 25, 1969, 80.

_Feature_Article_Hutchinson.pdf. Accessed December 15, 2018.

106 

Julia Brown, “Interview with Michael Heizer,” in Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse, ed. Julia Brown (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 27.

119 

Müller, “Michael Heizer,” 45. Suzaan Boettger, in Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, 114, argues that “the fissure of the title may refer to the nearby United States Atomic Research and Test Center, where experimental explosions had split the earth in a twelve-­mile fault near Las Vegas.”

120 

107 

Michael Heizer, “The Art of Michael Heizer,” Artforum 8 (December 1969): 21, 32.

108 

Bruce Hevly and John Findlay, eds., The Atomic West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998). For a discussion of the relationship between the nuclear testing grounds and Heizer’s art, see Alessandra Ponte, “Desert Testing,” in Picon and Ponte, Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, 81–­115.

109 

Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 260. For an engaging discussion of the debate surrounding the “Velikovsky Affair,” see Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

121 

Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 20.

Alfred Kazin, “On the Brink,” New Yorker, April 29, 1950, 103.

122 

123 

Smithson, “Interstellar Flit.”

Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (­Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), x.

124 

125 

Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 344, 9.

Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse, Part I: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 67–­86; reprinted in Craig Owens, Beyond Representation: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 52–­69.

126 

Julia Brown, “Interview with Michael Heizer,” in Brown, Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse, 13, 11.

110 

Robert J. Kett, “Monumentality as Method: ­ rchaeology and Land Art in the Cold War,” RepresentaA tions 130 (Spring 2015): 138.

111 

Michael Heizer to Robert Scull, one letter undated, one dated August 13, 1969. Ethel Scull Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. In Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, 193. He would repeat this assertion in 1982: “Heizer claims could withstand a nuclear attack by a hydrogen bomb,” which he added could be considered “the ultimate sculpture,” quoted in Bertram Gabriel, “Works of Earth,” Horizon (January–­February 1982): 48.

112 

113 

Smithson, “Interstellar Flit,” undated typescript, Robert Smithson/Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, reel 3834.

Peter Hutchinson, “The Fictionalization of the Past,” Arts 42 (December/January 1967): 32.

127 

David Morris, in The Masks of Lucifer: Technology and the Occult in Twentieth-­Century Popular Literature (London: B. T. Batsford,1993), 47, argues that Velikovsky writing in the 1940s saw the story of Exodus as a way of understanding the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people and its “suppressed fear that keeps people from recognizing it.”

128 

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 4.

129 

Brown, “Interview with Michael Heizer,” 16.

Heizer, quoted in Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” New Yorker, August 29, 2016, 62.

130 

Diane Waldman, “Holes without History,” ARTnews 70 (May 1971): 68. The artist himself acknowledged that, “obviously these works are pointed at the future,” in Brown, “Interview with Michael Heizer,” 34. He goes on to add, “Without trying, all art is commemorative.”

131 

114 

115 

Waldman, “Holes without History,” 68. On the possible influence of the moon landing, see Joy Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing,” Journal of Visual Culture 8 (December 2009): 299–­328.

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 8, 9. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 300.

Immanuel Velikovsky, Mankind in Amnesia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 86–­78.

132 

116 

Peter Hutchinson, “Earth in Upheaval,” Arts 43 (November 1968): 21; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,” Artforum 7 (April 1969): 53; reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily, 62–­64. The quotation is from Immanuel Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 259.

117 

Smithson, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 250–­ 51. Hutchinson recalls discussing the book with Smithson in “Robert Smithson and I,” http://province townarts.org/magazine_pdf_all/2012_pdf_files/2012

118 

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CREDIBILITY GAP 1  Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture” (1949), in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 318. 16 Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 70.

2 

E. C. Goosen, The Art of the Real: USA, 1948–­1968 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968). In the introductory essay Goosen defines the new interest in “the real” as making “no direct appeal to the emotions, nor is it involved in uplift. Indeed it seems to have no desire at all to justify itself, but instead offers itself for whatever its uniqueness is worth—­ in the form of the simple, irreducible, irrefutable object” (7).

3 

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Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 257–­58.

16  Daniel Boorstin, The Image; or, What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 240, 258, 261.

4 

Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocöon,” in Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, 1:35.

5 

17  The clearest statement of the role of bodily movement in minimalism is Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part I,” reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 222–­ 35. While Judd emphasized the optical aspects of his art, compelling readings highlighting this bodily engagement have been formulated by Rosalind Krauss, in “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum 4 (May 1966): 24–­26.

Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74–­82 and 183; reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–­1975, 184. The other reference is a negative one (184): “Painting and sculpture have become set forms. A fair amount of their meaning isn’t credible.”

6 

For a discussion of Judd’s relationship with British empiricism, see David Raskin, “Donald Judd,” in Donald Judd ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate Gallery, 2004), 81, 92. Many of the major figures of British empiricism would use the term credible in the central writings. Most notably, John Locke in An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) uses the word “credibility” twenty-­two times in the chapter “Extent of Human Knowledge.” Raskin notes that Judd quotes a passage of Locke’s book (without citation) in his essay “Specific Objects.”

7 

18  Rosalind Krauss provides a similar reading of minimal art in her essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Fall 1990): 3–­17, noting (10) that “minimalism seems to have been conceived in specific resistance to the fallen world of mass culture—­with its disembodied media images—­and of consumer culture—­ with its canalized, commoditized objects—­in an attempt to restore the immediacy of experience.”

Marianne Stockebrand, catalog entry for Untitled (1963), in Serota, Donald Judd, 176.

8 

Judd, “Specific Objects”; “In the Galleries [Robert Rauschenberg],” Arts 37 (May–­June 1963); “In the Galleries [Lee Bontecou],” Arts 37 (January 1963); reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–­1975, 202, 86, 65.

9 

10  David Raskin, “Judd’s Moral Art,” in Serota, Donald Judd, 176. For the artist’s position concerning the political aspects of his art, see his statement in “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” Artforum 9 (September 1970): 36–­37. 11  John Coplans, “An Interview with Don Judd,” Artforum 9 (June 1971): 45.

Judd, “Specific Objects,” 80.

Jane Harrison Cone, “Judd at the Whitney,” Art­forum 6 (May 1968): 39. 22 

23 

13  Sidney Tillim, “The New Avant-­Garde,” Arts 38 (February 1964): 20; John Perreault, “Plastic Ambiguities,” Village Voice, March 7, 1968, 19. 14  All of Judd’s works were untitled, yet many of them, especially the early plywood works from 1962 to 1964 (i.e., the one’s the artist made himself) were given colloquial names to identify them. For a discussion of the application of these “sobriquets,” see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 50, 280n24. In an interview with John Coplans from 1971, Judd seems amenable to the critic’s reference to one work as “the ladder piece,” suggesting that such allusiveness was recognized as an inherent vice of these works. Coplans, “An Interview with Don Judd,” 43. 15  David Batchelor persuasively demonstrates how Judd’s use of color, especially in his choice of Plexiglas, often had industrial and specifically automotive connotations. See “Everything is Colour,” in Serota, Donald Judd, 65–­75. For a discussion of how the serial attitude of minimalism operated within a similar logic of industrial production found in the pop art of the time, see Meyer, Minimalism, 185–­88.

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20  Barbara Reise, “Untitled 1969: A Footnote on Art and Minimal Stylehood,” Studio International (April 1969): 168; Hilton Kramer, “Art: Constructed to Donald Judd’s Specifications,” New York Times, February 19, 1966, 23; John Perreault, “Union Made, Report on a Phenomenon,” Arts 41 (March 1967): 26; James R. Mellow, “Everything Sculpture Has, My Work Doesn’t,” New York Times, March 10, 1968, D21. 21 

For an early discussion on the role of technology and industrial fabrication in Judd’s oeuvre, see Douglas Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology, and Art (New York: Praeger, 1973), 41–­43. 12 

Notes to Chapter Four

19  A similar blurring between art and life was posthumously attributed to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. The most well-­known example of this argument can be found in Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” ARTnews 57 (October 1958): 24–­26, 55–­57.

Mellow, “Everything Sculpture Has,” D21.

24  Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts 64 (January 1990): 44–­63. 25  Melvin Edwards, artist’s statement, in Melvin Edwards: Works (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970), n.p. 26  “Art,” Time, June 3, 1966, 64; “Art,” Time, May 2, 1969, 54; Donald Judd, “Lee Bontecou,” Arts 39 (April 1965); reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–­1975, 179; Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (June 1967): 12–­23; reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, 135. 27  Barbara Rose, “A New Aesthetic,” in A New Aesthetic (Washington, DC: Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1969), 14, 34. 28  Annette Michelson, “An Aesthetics of Transgression,” in Robert Morris (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969), 78n18. 29  The subject of war would be a major theme in the Morris oeuvre, demonstrated in his 1964 dance performance War and continuing in a large body of work from the

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1980s and ’90s, such as the Firestone Series (1982–­83) and Restless Sleepers/Atomic Shroud (1991). On Morris’s engagement with the politics of the Vietnam War, see Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 107–­23.

in Lake City (1963–­64, Mu­seum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf), calling them “free and electric in a static field.” Judd, “In the Galleries: Frank Stella” (1961); reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–­1975, 58. Cited in Shiff, “Donald Judd, Safe from Birds.”

30  David Raskin, “Specific Opposition: Judd’s Art and Politics,” Art History 24 (November 2001): 682–­706.

42  Robert Pincus-­Witten, “Fining It Down: Don Judd at Castelli,” Artforum 8 (June 1970): 48, 49.

31  Donald Judd, “Nie Wieder Krieg,” in Donald Judd, Architecture, ed. Peter Noever (Ostfildern-­Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 16.

43  Michael Fried, “Three American Painters” (1965); reprinted in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 260. For a discussion of the relationship between Fried’s aesthetic theory and the rise of information theory in the 1960s, see Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), esp. 37–­81.

32  For a discussion of Judd’s experiences as a civil engineer in Korea, see Urs Peter Flückiger, Donald Judd: Architecture in Marfa, Texas (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007), 32. On the former military uses of the Chinati site, see Nicolas Serota, “Donald Judd: A Sense of Place, Judd in Marfa between 1971 and 1994,” in Serota, Donald Judd, 98–­110. 33  For Judd’s account of his purchase of Fort Russell and his ambivalence about the site’s previous incarnation, see Donald Judd, “Artillery Shed” (1989), in Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd, ed. Marianne Stockebrand (Marfa, TX: Chinati Foundation in Association with Yale University Press, 2009), 272–­86. 34 

Boorstin, The Image, 226.

35 

“A Nation at Odds,” Newsweek, July 10, 1967, 17.

45  Max Kozloff, “Men and Machines,” Artforum 7 (February 1969): 23. 46  Annette Michelson,” Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge,” Artforum 7 (February 1969): 56.

The first appearance of the term in the New York Times occurred in John D. Morris, “G.O.P. Chief Score Use of Statistics,” March 18, 1966, 56. By August of that year it had become a headline topic. See Tom Wicker, “The Inevitable Credibility Gap,” New York Times, August 12, 1966, 30; “The ‘Credibility Gap’ Widens in Massillon, Ohio: A Town’s Troubled Mood as the War Comes Home,” Life, August 2, 1966, 50–­56; Kenneth Crawford, “The Credibility Gap,” Newsweek, January 16, 1966, 32. For a comprehensive analysis of the diplomatic use of credibility in postwar US foreign policy, see Frank Ninkovich, “Wilsonianism at Work: Credibility Crises of the 1950s and 1960s,” in The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 183–­214. 36 

37  Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 341, 66. For an insightful discussion on the relationship between war, and specifically nuclear arms, and the culture of spectacle, see Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1988). 38  Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 134. 39  Rosalind Krauss was perhaps the first critic to recognize the illusionary qualities of Judd’s art, noting in particular how Judd rejected pictorial illusion but emphasized lived or perceptual illusion. See her “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd.” 40  Richard Shiff, “Donald Judd, Safe from Birds,” in Serota, Donald Judd, 41–­42.

In a short review praising the “innovation” of Frank Stella’s recent paintings, Judd would invoke a decidedly technological metaphor to describe the illusionistic diagonals produced by the convergence of perpendicular stripes 41 

44  Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) (New York: Vintage, 1962), 79.

47  The specific nuclear connotations of the movie are made explicit in Arthur C. Clark’s novel, written in collaboration with Kubrick’s film. For instance, in the final paragraphs of the novel, the Star Child detonates “the circling megatons” of “a slumbering cargo of death” orbiting Earth. See Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (New York: Penguin, 1993), 236. 48 

49  David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), 513. 50  John Perreault, “No One Has Clearly Pointed Out,” Village Voice, January 12, 1967; reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, 259; Paul Goodman, “The Psychology of Being Powerless,” New York Review of Books, November 6, 1966, 14–­18. For a discussion of Judd’s relation to technology, and in particular the modernization of New York City, see Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 150–­86. 51  On the representation of violence in the Western tradition, see Leo Bersani and Ulysee Dutoit, “The Forms of Violence,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 17–­29. For a contemporaneous discussion on the tendency to marginalize public violence, see Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970). 52  Julia Bryan-­Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 77; Carl Andre, “Time: A Panel Discussion,” March 17, 1969, transcript edited by Lucy Lippard, 6. Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 53 

“A Nation at Odds,” Newsweek, July 19, 1967, 19.

Judd, quoted in David Bourdon, “Immodest Proposals for Monuments,” New York World Journal Tribune, January 8, 1967, 22. 54 

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“A Nation at Odds,” Newsweek, July 10, 1967, 19.

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55  Surveys done during the 1960s identified a steady decline among the general public in their sense of political efficacy and their sense of trust in the gov­ernment. See Philip E. Converse, “Change in the American Electorate,” in The Human Meaning of Social Change, ed. Angus Campbell and Phillip E. Converse (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972), cited in Arthur H. Miller, “Political Issues and Trust in Government: 1964–­1970,” American Political Science Review 68 (September 1974): 951.

Michael Kimmelman, “Out of Minimalism, Monuments to Memory,” New York Times, January 13, 2002, section 2, page 1. The author goes on to write, “What used to be men on horses with thrusting swords has morphed more or less into plain walls and boxes.” 56 

57  Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 7. 58  As Anne Wagner notes, “In the end, what is most provocative about Maya Lin’s memorial—­and most disturbing to its opponents—­is its willingness to dispense entirely with any evocation of the bodies of the fallen.” In “Maya Lin’s Memorial,” in Anne Middleton Wagner, A House Divided: American Art since 1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 73. 59  “Stop That Monument,” National Review, September 18, 1981, 1064.

Gregory Battcock, “Critique, Four Artists Who Didn’t Show in New York This Season,” Arts 42 (Summer 1968): 16.

4 

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William Anastasi, interview with Thomas McEvilley, August 1989, in William Anastasi, A Selection of Work from 1960 to 1989 (New York: Scott Hanson Gallery, 1989), 19.

Anastasi, A Selection of Work from 1960 to 1989, 19. A similar sentiment was expressed by the physicist Richard Feynman, who worked on the Manhattan Project: “I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. . . . How far from here was 34th street? . . . All those buildings, all smashed—­and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.” Feynman, quoted in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 136.

8 

Buckminster Fuller, “Utopia or Oblivion,” in Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Bantam, 1969), 278, 285, 288.

9 

G[regory] B[attcock], Reviews, Arts 41 (Summer 1967):

11  Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 2,” Artforum 4 (February 1966); reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 15. 12  Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post-­60s Sculpture,” Artforum 12 (November 1973): 49. 13  Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (June 1967): 21. In his book The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing writes that “experience is man’s invisibility to man.” 14  Dan Graham, “Subject Matter” (1969), in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965–­1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 40. 15  Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969), 8, 16.

Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 270. Certain writers have alluded in passing to these larger social inflections in this strand of art. See, for instance, Richard Williams in After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe, 1965–­1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) and Charlie Gere in Art, Time, and Technology (New York: Berg, 2006). G[regory] B[attcock], Reviews, Arts 41 (Summer 1967): 57.

Battcock, “Critique,” 16.

7 

10 

CHAPTER FIVE: THE EMPTY ROOM 1  Michael Lobel reads “I Can See the Whole Room” as “a visual pun on abstraction,” in which a monochrome is invaded by language and recognizable imagery. Lobel, Image Duplicator (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 75.

3 

6 

57.

60  “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is meant to focus solely on the tragic loss of American lives, eliding all reference to the profound national crisis in social and political authority engendered by the conduct of the war.” Daniel Abramson, “Maya Lin and the 1960s: Monuments, Time Lines, and Minimalism,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Summer 1996): 705. He goes on to write, “In effect, Lin’s monuments do to 1960s minimalism what they did to the decade’s social struggles. They repackage the difficult, the divisive, and the controversial into loci of popular satisfaction and ­conciliation.”

2 

Barbara Rose, “A New Aesthetic,” in A New Aesthetic (Washington, DC: Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1969), 18.

5 

16  Robert Smithson, “The Eliminator,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 327. 17  Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily, 175–­209. 18  Mel Bochner, “Review of Larry Bell,” Arts (January 1966), and “Donald Judd,” Arts (April 1966); reprinted in Solar System and Restrooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965–­2007 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 2, 5. 19  For a comprehensive account of Tingley’s work and its relation to the atomic culture of the West, see E ­ mily Eliza Scott, “Desert Ends,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, ed. Philipp Kaiser and M ­ iwon Kwon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), esp. 68–­82.

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20  Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966), 212, 224.

John Perreault, “No One Has Clearly Pointed Out,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 259; Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land” and “Entropy and the New Monuments,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 7, 14–­15, 17. 21 

22  Peter Hutchinson, “Is There Life on Earth,” Art in America 54 (November/December 1966): 68, 69. See also Peter Hutchinson, “Science-­Fiction: An Aesthetic for Science,” Art International 12 (October 1968): 32, 34.

37  Bochner, “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism,” in ­Battcock, Minimal Art, 99.

39  Gregory Battcock, “Painting is Obsolete,” New York Free Press, January 23, 1969, 7; reprinted in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 88.

24  Robert Smithson, “Can Man Survive,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 367.

40  Lucy Lippard, “Introduction,” in 557,087 (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 5 September–­5 October 1969); reprinted in Alberro and Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, 178.

25  Smithson and Mel Bochner, “The Domain of the Great Bear,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 33. 26  Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, 16 mm film, 35 min., color, sound.

41  Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–­1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 141. Alex Potts provides a more historically expansive account of such installation practices and their implications in his essay “Installation and Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal 24 (2001): 5–­24.

27  James Meyer: Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 166. 28  See Alex Potts, “The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

42  Dore Ashton, “New York Commentary,” Studio International (March 1970): 118.

29  Phillip Leider, “Gallery ’68: High Art and Low Art,” Look, January 1968); reprinted in Flavin: A Retrospective (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2004), 19. Anne Wagner has noted, “the documentary photographs published to date have mostly recorded Flavin’s pieces devoid of viewers, with the camera assuming the spectator’s role. There are exceptions, of course, but surprisingly few have made their way into print.” Anne Wagner, “Flavin’s Limited Light,” in Dan Flavin: New Light, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 124.

Lucy Lippard, “New York Letter,” Art International 9 (March 1965): 46. 30 

T. B., “Reviews,” ARTnews 63 (February 1965): 13.

32  John Perreault, “Dan Flavin’s New Arrangements,” Art International (March 1967); reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art, 258. Flavin, writing in a personal note, described his early icons as “constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms.” In Dan Flavin: Three Installation in Fluorescent Light (Cologne: Kunsthalle Köln, 1973), 83. 33  Bochner, “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism,” in ­Battcock, Minimal Art, 99.

Jill Johnson, ARTnews 63 (January 1965): 13; Mel Bochner, “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism,” in Battcock, Minimal Art, 99. Jack Burnham, in “A Dan Flavin Retrospective in Ottawa,” Artforum 9 (­December 1969): 54, similarly notes how Flavin’s works “neatly succeed [optically] in destroying the corners of a rectilinear space.” 34 

36  James R. Mellow, “New York Letter,” Art International 13 (January 1969): 53; Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal,” in Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, 60.

38  Robert Barry, in “Four Interviews with Author Rose,” Arts (February 1969); reprinted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 71.

23  Robert Smith, “Museum Uses Psychedelic Lights and Electronic Music to Show That Life Can Be Ugly,” New York Times, May 19, 1969, 29. See also Wilfred Sheed, “Evolution of a Bad Trip,” Life, July 11, 1969, 7.

31 

35  Gregory Battcock, “Aggressive Sculpture,” Westside News, November 2, 1967, 8.

43  Gregory Battcock, “The Politics of Space,” Arts 44 (February 1970): 40. 44  Gregory Battcock, “New York,” Art and Artists (March 1970): 43. 45  Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (New York: Beacon, 1969), 27, 29, 31, 37, 49, 82. 46 

47  Nancy Foote, “The Apotheosis of Crummy Space,” Artforum 15 (October 1976): 34. For a discussion of the rise of alternative spaces in economically depressed neighborhoods in the 1970s, see Jacki Apple, “Alternatives Reconsidered,” in Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 to 2010 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 18–­19. 48  Kim Levin, “Dennis Oppenheim: Post-­Performance Work,” Arts 53 (September 1978): 122. 49  Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index, Part 2,” in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 212, 217. 50  Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 1986), 77, 14, 15, 91. The essay was originally published in three parts as “Inside the White Cube” in 1976 in the March, April, and November issues of Artforum.

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Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” 32.

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51  Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Fall 1990): 9, 3. 52  Krauss, “Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 3; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–­1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 122. 53  Dora Apel, “The Ruins of Capitalism,” Jacobin, https:// www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/ruin-porn -imagery-photography-detroit. Accessed December 15, 2018.

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INDEX

Italic pages refer to figures 0 OBJECTS, 0 PAINTERS, 0 SCULPTURES exhibition, 207 12 Americans catalog, 41 13 Most Wanted Men (Warhol), 60 15 Americans exhibition, 104–5, 108 16 Americans exhibition, 163–64 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 56, 183, 184, 200 557,087 exhibition, 209 abstraction: expressionism and, 11, 27, 35, 42, 71–72, 130, 153; fate and, 35, 38; pure, 72; Smith and, 72; weapons and, 73–86 Act of Aggression, The (Ferber), 108 Adagio Dancer (Smith), 97 Adorno, Theodor, 9 aerial art, 96–107 agency, 13, 67, 92, 129, 141, 145, 163, 210 Agricola (Smith), 89 airplanes, 10, 27, 54, 70, 75, 83, 101, 148 Airways to Peace exhibition, 100–104 Albright Knox Museum, 47 Aldiss, Brian, 133, 151 Allegorical Landscape (Morse), 142 Alloway, Lawrence, 34–35, 152 aluminum, 18, 63, 89, 96, 130, 169–71, 177 American Museum of Natural History, 201–2 Anastasi, William, 29, 194–97, 207, 211–12 Andre, Carl: Bochner on, 206; credibility and, 164, 186; empty room aesthetic and, 198–99, 206, 213; new monuments and, 127, 129, 135, 137–38; politics of experience and, 198; reversed ruins and, 148, 151 Andrews, Oliver, 57 anthropocentrism, 12, 129, 157 “Anti-Form” (Morris), 219n28 antihumanism, 12, 26, 129–31, 135, 141, 145, 193–94 antimonumentalism, 118, 126 antiwar movement: credibility and, 175–76, 185–86; imagery of, 11, 25; monuments and, 121, 124–25; Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and, 210; Vietnam War and, 11; weapons and, 72, 77 Apel, Dora, 215 apocalypse: atomic energy and, 10, 17; bombs and, 10; credibility and, 182–85; empty room aesthetic and, 194, 200–201, 206, 212, 215; fate and, 33, 38, 54, 57–58, 63; Fuller and, 16; global warming and, 16, 217n20; imagination of disaster and, 194, 200–201; new monuments and, 130, 133; nuclear energy and, 12–13, 15–16, 26; oblivion and, 16, 20, 23–24, 68, 72–73, 107–15, 126, 133, 164, 196–97, 214–15; reversed ruins and, 151, 155–56; slow, 16; technology and, 182–85; utopia and, 16; weapons and, 10–11, 24, 26, 71, 73, 90, 108

Apocalyptic Rider (Ferber), 108 apotropaism, 86–96 Archangel (Lipton), 63 Ark, The (Saturo), 57 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 114–15, 132, 173, 186 Artforum magazine, 117, 129, 154, 182, 186, 204, 213 Art in Process exhibition, 138 Art International magazine, 166 Art into Life (Heizer), 156–57 ARTnews magazine, 41, 60, 63, 90, 127, 205 Art of Assemblage, The (exhibition), 59, 88 Art of the Real exhibition, 164 Arts Magazine, 166 Art Workers’ Coalition, 209–10 Asher, Michael, 206 Ashton, Dore, 210 Aspen Center for Contemporary Art, 176 “As We May Think” (Bush), 31 Atom Bomb and the Future of Man, The (Jaspers), 200 atomic energy: apocalypse, 10, 17, 74, 212; credibility and, 163, 179; entropy and, 134, 143; existentialism and, 11; fate and, 32–33, 46–47, 52, 54, 56–57, 60, 62; fear and, 10–11, 46, 52, 54, 200; Heizer and, 153, 155; Hiroshima and, 9, 33, 59, 157, 159, 233n8; imagination of disaster and, 200; missiles and, 47; monumentalism and, 9–11, 13, 17, 24; Nagasaki and, 9, 33, 59; Nevada Test Site and, 200; new monuments and, 133–34; posthumanist threat and, 160; reversed ruins and, 143, 153, 155, 160–61; Stephan on, 74; as threat to civilization, 73 Atomic Energy in Action (Burtin), 133 Atomic Research and Test Center, 153 Atomic west, 155, 230n109 Audio-Video Underground Chamber (Nauman), 192 autonomy: credibility and, 164, 171, 177, 182; empty room aesthetic and, 195; fate and, 57; monumentalism and, 19–20; monuments and, 118; reversed ruins and, 147, 159; weapons and, 68, 70, 103, 108 avant-garde, 12, 31–33, 117–18, 132, 191 Baker, Elizabeth, 123, 139 Ballard, J. G., 133, 141, 222n17 Baltimore Museum of Art, 38 Barkan, Leonard, 39 Barr, Alfred H., 31, 32, 38, 91, 218n3 Barry, Robert, 29, 157, 207, 208, 211–12, 215 Bateson, Gregory, 163 Battcock, Gregory, 194–97, 206–11 Baudelaire, Charles, 74 Baur, John, 110 Bayer, Herbert, 100 Bed of Spikes (De Maria), 172–73, 186 “Bed Peace” (Lennon and Ono), 124 Belafonte, Harry, 26 Bell, Larry, 85, 199–200, 210 Benjamin, Walter, 150 Bernstein Brothers, 182 Beyond Modern Sculpture (Burnham), 16

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Bible, 16, 51, 63, 71, 107–8, 159 Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, 53, 101 Billings, Henry, 83–84 Bladen, Ronald, 114, 172 Blob, The (film), 201 Bochner, Mel, 127, 138, 199–200, 202, 205–6 Bollinger, William, 157 bombs: apocalyptic power of, 10, 12, 16, 26, 33, 63, 73, 200, 212; art of, 193–97; atomic, 9–12, 24, 32–33, 46, 73, 155, 160, 163, 200; continued threat of, 16; credibility and, 163, 165, 178–79, 193–97; empty room aesthetic and, 212; entropy and, 140, 160; existentialism and, 12–13; fate and, 9–11, 32–33, 46, 73; Hiroshima and, 9, 33, 59, 157, 159, 233n8; humanism and, 193–94; hydrogen, 124; imagination of disaster and, 200; Nagasaki and, 9, 33, 59; new monuments and, 124, 140; nuclear, 11–12, 26, 53–54, 101, 155, 165, 178–79, 196, 200; phenomenology of, 67; postmodern skepticism and, 216n14; postwar references to, 10–11, 14, 99–101, 104–5, 108, 114; prophetic art and, 33; reversed ruins and, 155, 160; surrealism and, 33 Bontecou, Lee: anthropomorphisms and, 78; apotropaism and, 95–96; credibility and, 166, 173; fate and, 63, 64; Judd on, 96; metal and, 78–79, 84, 96; minimalism and, 173; Untitled and, 85; weapons and, 77–79, 84–85, 94, 95–96 Boorstin, Daniel, 169–70, 178 Bow, The (Ferber), 80 Boyer, Paul, 15, 24 Bradbury, Ray, 26 Brancusi, Constantin, 38 brass, 43, 104, 169, 180–81 Breathing Machines (Hershman Leeson), 77 Broken Obelisk (Newman), 30, 35–44, 57, 62, 65, 114, 126, 148, 156 bronze, 39, 62, 120 Broome Street (Mallary), 58, 59 Brown, Norman, 31 brutalism, 71–72, 75, 172–73, 181 Buchloh, Benjamin, 226n123 Bull Run Battlefield Monument, 186, 187 Burckhardt, Rudy, 203 Burnham, Jack, 16 Burtin, Will, 133–34 Bush, Vannevar, 31 Butler, Reg, 120 Cactus Man (González), 68 Cage, John, 182 Calas, Nicolas, 139 Calder, Alexander, 90–91 Can Man Survive? exhibition, 201–2 Carmichael, Stokely, 194 Caruth, Cathy, 22, 160 Castelli Gallery, 181 Castoro, Rosemarie, 209 catastrophe: empty room aesthetic and, 200, 202; fate and, 39, 41; Hague and, 39–40; imagination of disaster and, 200, 202; monumentalism and, 9, 17; reversed ruins and, 139, 149–61; Smithson and, 17, 157–59, 161; weapons and, 94 Cavell, Stanley, 67 Charles Alan Gallery, 86 Chave, Anna, 172

Chinati Foundation, 176–77 Christo, 124 CIA, 120 City 3 (Grippe), 14, 45–46 City (Heizer), 14, 155–56, 161 Civil Rights movement, 27, 176 Clark, T. J., 71 Clarke, Arthur C., 56–57, 184 Cleopatra’s Needle, 37, 126, 227n29 Cliffhangers (Mallary), 60–62, 65 Closed Gallery Piece (Barry), 207 Clouds of Magellan (Lassaw), 106–7 Clurman, Harold, 111 Cold War: anticipatory attitude of, 22; credibility and, 176, 178, 185–89; Cuban missile crises and, 15, 28, 37, 165, 175, 178, 212; culture of, 11; Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line and, 50; Judd and, 185–89; missiles and, 178 (see also missiles); propaganda of, 13; prospective war and, 22–24; reversed trauma and, 22–24; survival culture and, 10–12, 72–73; weapons and, 72–73; World War Three and, 22 communism, 121 conceptualism, 11–12, 137 concrete, 10, 18, 107, 115, 120–24, 149, 156 constructivism, 56, 68, 74, 91, 110, 182 “Contemporary Art and the Plight of the Public” (Steinberg), 44 Corcoran Gallery of Art, 37–38, 114 Corten. See steel counterculture, 24, 103, 193, 209 Cracking 17 (Castoro), 209 credibility: Andre and, 164, 186; antiwar movement and, 175–76, 185–86; apocalypse and, 182–85; atomic energy and, 163, 179; autonomy and, 164, 171, 177, 182; bombs and, 163, 165, 178–79, 193–97; Bontecou and, 166, 173; Cold War and, 176, 178, 185–89; fate and, 164, 178, 183; fear and, 178–79, 183, 185; Ferber and, 164; Flavin and, 174; fluorescent light and, 174; futurism and, 182; gap, 178–79; humanism and, 165–66; Judd and, 28, 163–88, 185–89, 195; material actuality and, 163–65; minimalism and, 164, 171–78, 182–89; modernism and, 164, 166, 173, 182, 189; monumentalism and, 165; Morris and, 164, 174–76, 186, 190; Newman and, 166; nuclear weapons and, 165, 176–79, 183, 185–86; objectivity and, 168, 178, 180, 183, 187; oblivion and, 164; Oldenburg and, 186; Roszak and, 164; science fiction and, 169, 185; Smith and, 168; specific objects and, 169–72; spectacular society and, 169–72; Stankiewicz and, 163–65, 168; steel and, 169, 171; technology and, 167, 170, 178, 182–87; terror and, 173, 186; utopia and, 183; Vietnam War and, 167, 174, 176–79, 185–88; World War II and, 167 Creighton, Thomas, 18–19 Crisis (Morris), 175 crystals, 130, 141–42, 148, 201 Cuban missile crisis, 15, 28, 37, 165, 175, 178, 212 Cubi series (Smith), 226n3 cubism, 59, 68–75, 117, 182 Cunliffe, Marcus, 54, 220n60 Cuvier, Georges, 158 cybernetics, 10, 40–41, 117, 128 Cybernetics (Wiener), 140 cyborgs, 78, 88 Dada, 59, 74–75, 117

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“Entropy and the New Monuments” (Smithson), 130, 201, 228n51 Epstein, Jacob, 75, 76 Ernst, Max, 33–34 Essay on Liberation, An (Marcuse), 211–12 Étant Donnés (Duchamp), 85 Europe after the Rain (Ernst), 33 Evergood, Philip, 11 Execution (Segal), 186 Extending Horizontal Form (Hunt), 79

Daruma (Noguchi), 80 Darwin, Charles, 158 decay: empty room aesthetic and, 213, 215; fate and, 35, 37, 41, 43, 59–60; new monuments and, 129–30, 137; reversed ruins and, 145, 150, 154 Defender (Lipton), 51 de Kooning, Willem, 10, 42, 72 Delue, Howard, 62 De Maria, Walter, 172–73, 186 Devree, Howard, 46 Dia:Beacon, 214–15 Dick, Philip K., 73, 87, 92, 222n17 Die (Smith), 122, 123, 128 Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, 50 di Suvero, Mark, 127 Donadio, Emmie, 223n52 Donatello, 107–8, 114, 225n105 Donovan, William, 163 Dorn, Ed, 13 Doryphoros, 79 Dr. Strangelove (film), 178–79, 183, 200 Dubin, Nina, 150–51 Duchamp, Marcel, 85 Dwan Gallery, 194, 196, 212 Dylan, Bob, 144, 194 Dymaxion House (Fuller), 89 earth art. See land art Earth Art (exhibition), 137 Earth Forge (Lipton), 87 Earth in Upheaval (Velikovsky), 157–61 Earthworks (Adliss), 151 Edwards, Melvin, 26, 172 Egypt, 35, 37, 41, 108, 126 Einstein, Albert, 39 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 9, 115 Eliminator, The (Smithson), 199 Elsen, Albert, 38 Empty Room, The (Lipton), 112 empty room aesthetic: Anastasi and, 29, 194–97, 207, 211–12; Andre and, 198–99, 206, 213; apocalypse and, 194, 200–201, 206, 212, 215; autonomy and, 195; Barry and, 29, 207, 208, 211–12, 215; Bochner and, 206; bomb art and, 193–97, 212; catastrophe and, 200, 202; decay and, 213, 215; entropy and, 213; Flavin and, 191, 193–94, 201, 203–6; fluorescent light and, 191, 193, 206; futurism and, 202, 211; humanism and, 211, 214; imagination of disaster and, 200–202; Judd and, 203, 214; Krauss and, 194, 198, 213–15; minimalism and, 194–95, 198–206, 211–14; modernism and, 191, 195; monuments and, 201, 215; Morris and, 203, 205; Nauman and, 29, 191–94, 213; Newman and, 204; nuclear weapons and, 196, 200, 212; oblivion and, 196–97, 214–15; phenomenology and, 194, 200–201, 206, 211, 214; politics of experience and, 197–200; Smithson and, 198–202, 206; steel and, 213; symbolism and, 209; terror and, 215; trauma and, 196, 200, 211–12; utopia and, 194, 196–97, 209, 211–12, 215; Vietnam War and, 210; World War II and, 200 entropy: bombs and, 140, 160; empty room aesthetic and, 213; gravity and, 140; imagination of disaster and, 201; new monuments and, 117, 130–43; oblivion and, 20; reversed ruins and, 143–45, 148–51, 153, 160–61; Smithson and, 20, 27–28, 130–45, 148–49, 151, 153, 160–61, 201, 228n51; Wiener and, 140–41

F-111 (Rosenquist), 11, 170, 183 Fail Safe (film), 178, 183, 200 Faison, Lane, 80 False Peace Spectre (Smith), 70–71 Family of Man, The (exhibition), 28, 101 fate: abstraction and, 35, 38; American species and, 12; anticipated dereliction and, 38–47; apocalypse and, 33, 38, 54, 57–58, 63; atomic weapons and, 32–33, 46–47, 52, 54, 56–57, 60, 62; autonomy and, 57; bombs and, 9–11, 32–33, 46, 73; Bontecou and, 63, 64; catastrophe and, 39, 41; Cliffhangers and, 60–62, 65; credibility and, 164, 178, 183; decay and, 35, 37, 41, 43, 59–60; fear and, 37, 46–47, 52, 54, 59; Ferber and, 58; forsaken future and, 33–38; futurism and, 33, 47, 52–57, 65; Grippe and, 44–48; Hague and, 27, 39–44, 52, 62–63; historical continuity and, 31–32; humanism and, 32, 34; of humanity, 9–13, 24, 32, 38, 57, 65, 183; imagination of disaster and, 164, 178, 183; Johns and, 41–44, 46, 59, 63; Johnson and, 60, 62–63; Judd and, 60; Krauss and, 38; Lassaw and, 39, 58; Lipton and, 27, 39, 50–52, 54, 57–58, 63; modernism and, 31, 38–39, 44, 54, 56–57; monuments and, 35–38, 43, 46, 55, 135, 139–43; Newman and, 33–38, 43–44, 57, 62, 65; new sense of, 31–65; nuclear weapons and, 34, 37, 54, 57–58, 60; prophetic perspective and, 33, 38, 47–65; reversed ruins and, 143–44, 148–49, 155, 159; Roszak and, 27, 53–57, 62, 63; science fiction and, 52; sentinels and, 47–56; Smithson and, 139–43; steel and, 37, 43, 48, 51; technology and, 44, 51–52, 56, 62; terror and, 33, 57; trauma and, 52, 56, 60; weapons and, 71–74, 88; World War II and, 31, 39, 46, 58 Faulkner, William, 10, 16, 216n5 fear: anticipatory, 23; apocalypse, 17 (see also apocalypse); atomic energy and, 10–11, 46, 52, 54, 200; credibility and, 178–79, 183, 185; fate and, 37, 46–47, 52, 54, 59; Faulkner on, 10; imagination of disaster and, 200; nuclear energy and, 11, 15, 17, 23, 26, 28, 37, 54, 178–79, 183, 185, 196, 200; race and, 26; reversed ruins and, 151, 158; weapons and, 71, 78, 112 feminism, 25–26 Ferber, Herbert: The Act of Aggression and, 108; Apocalyptic Rider and, 108; Baur on, 110; The Bow and, 80; credibility and, 164; Donatello and, 107–8, 114, 225n105; fate and, 58; Game No. 2 and, 82–83, 85; Goosen on, 109; Hazardous Encounter and, 108; Heraldic and, 80, 81; Homage to Piranesi and, 109; modern oblivion and, 107–11, 114; new monuments and, 130; “The New Sculpture” symposium and, 102–3; Omnibus Shadow and, 108; religious imagery and, 58; “Sculpture as Environment” and, 110; Seckler and, 225n105; weapons and, 69, 72–73, 79–86, 102, 107–11, 114 Feynman, Richard, 233n8 “Fictionalization of the Past, The” (Hutchinson), 160 Finch College Gallery, 138

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Fitzsimmons, James, 112 Flag (Johns), 41–42, 44, 157 Flash Art magazine, 163 Flashlight (Johns), 41, 42 Flavin, Dan: avant-garde and, 117; Bochner on, 206; credibility and, 174; empty room aesthetic and, 191, 193–94, 201–6; imagination of disaster and, 130, 201; monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush and, 115, 121, 124; monumentalism and, 19–20, 28–29; “monument” for V. Tatlin and, 132; monuments and, 117–18, 121, 124; new monuments and, 128–33, 135, 138, 142; Perrault on, 205–6; simulated ruination and, 130; Smith on, 121; Smithson on, 206; Untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichenstein on not seeing anyone in the room) and, 191, 193; weapons and, 114, 115 Flight (Smith), 97 fluorescent light: credibility and, 174; empty room aesthetic and, 191, 193, 206; monuments and, 121; new monuments and, 129, 132, 135; postwar space and, 114–15 Follet, Jean, 88 Forbidden Planet (film), 72 formalism, 137, 181–82 Forms in Transit (Roszak), 62, 63, 80, 170 Foucault, Michel, 12 Four Environments by New Realists (exhibition), 113 Four Soldiers (Smith), 55, 79–80 Fourteen Americans exhibition, 91 Fragment from Aldebaran (Lassaw), 107 Freud, Sigmund, 22, 191 Fried, Michael, 114–15, 132, 147, 164, 173, 182, 186, 198 Fry, Edward, 81–82 Fuller, Buckminster, 15–16, 89, 143, 196, 201, 212, 223n51 Future, The (exhibition), 134 Future Shock (Toffler), 160 futurism: apotropaic animism and, 86, 88; credibility and, 182; dynamism and, 52; empty room aesthetic and, 202; fate and, 47, 52–53; primeval organic and, 92; primitivism and, 47; rhetoric of dread and, 73; Smith and, 71; technology and, 53, 92; Vidler and, 23; weapons and, 71, 73, 78, 86, 88, 92 futurological imagination: empty room aesthetic and, 211; fate and, 33, 47, 54–57, 65; reversed ruins and, 139 Galaxy (Kiesler), 105–6 Gallery Decompositions (Oppenheim), 137 Game No. 2 (Ferber), 82–83, 85 Gates of Hell (Rodin), 117 Gateway Arch (Saarinen), 8, 19, 119–20 Giacometti, Alberto, 38, 90, 98–99, 109, 112 Giedion, Sigfried, 18–19 glass: Bell and, 85, 200, 210; Burtin and, 134; crystals and, 201; monumentalism and, 18; plexiglass, 63, 133, 201; Wright and, 113; World War II bombers and, 63 Glass House, 106 global warming, 16, 217n20 Golden Bird Is Often Sad, The (Stankiewicz), 89, 164 Goldwater, Robert, 75 Golub, Leon, 25 González, Julio, 47, 68, 69, 71 Goodman, Paul, 185 Goosen, E. C., 109, 230n3 Gottlieb, Adolph, 11, 35, 45 graffiti, 46–47

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Graham, Dan, 124, 128–29, 135–38, 144, 198 Gramsci Monument (Hirschhorn), 20 gravity: entropy and, 140; Greenberg and, 113; Grippe and, 45; Mallary and, 60, 62, 65; Saarinen and, 119; Serra and, 138–39; Smith and, 49, 97, 99–100 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 23 Greece, 37, 41 Green, Eleanor, 114 Greenberg, Clement, 69–71, 113, 163–65, 221n8, 222n10 Green Gallery, 190, 203, 205 Grippe, Peter: City 3 and, 14, 45–46, 101; fate and, 44–48; gravity and, 45; Growth after Destruction and, 46; influence of, 44–45; lost wax technique and, 45–46; Newman and, 219n37; terra-cotta and, 45–47; weapons and, 69, 72, 101, 107 Growth after Destruction (Grippe), 46 Guernica (Picasso), 101, 210 Guggenheim Museum, 34 Haeberle, Ronald, 210 Hague, Raoul, 27, 39–44, 52, 62–63 Hamill, Sarah, 71, 97 Harper’s Bazaar magazine, 44 Has Man a Future (Russell), 200 Hazardous Encounter (Ferber), 108 Heizer, Michael: Art into Life and, 156–57; atomic energy and, 153, 155; City and, 14, 155–56, 161; monuments and, 118; Nine Nevada Depressions and, 152–57; reversed ruins and, 152–58, 161; Scull and, 230n112 Heraldic (Ferber), 80, 81 Herald (Lipton), 51 Hershman Leeson, Lynn, 77, 213 Hess, Tom, 41 Hesse, Eva, 127 Hiroshima, 9, 33, 59, 157, 159, 233n8 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 20 Holocaust, 58 Holt, Nancy, 85 Homage to New York (Tinguely), 75–76 Homage to Piranesi (Ferber), 109 Home of the Welder (Smith), 95 “Homes for America” (Graham), 134–35, 145 Hudson River Landscape (Smith), 98 Huebler, Douglas, 208 humanism: antihumanism and, 12, 26, 129–31, 135, 141, 145, 193–94; bomb art and, 193–94; credibility and, 165–66; empty room aesthetic and, 211, 214; fate and, 32, 34; monumentalism and, 11–12, 26, 128–31, 135, 140–41; reversed ruins and, 145, 151, 160; weapons and, 67, 74 Human Use of Human Beings, The: Cybernetics and Society (Wiener), 117, 140–41, 143 Hunt, Richard, 26, 79, 86 Hunter, Sam, 224n65 Huot, Robert, 206, 207, 209, 210 Hutchinson, Peter, 144, 157, 159–60, 201 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 127, 127–28 I Can See the Whole Room (Lichtenstein), 191–92, 197 “Ideographic Image, The” (Newman), 44–45 illusion, 28, 34, 68, 70, 76–77, 164–66, 170–71, 180–82, 185, 195 Image, The: or, What Happened to the American Dream (Boorstin), 169–70

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modernist antimonumentalism and, 118; politics of experience and, 198; ROOMS exhibition and, 213; “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” and, 117; Smith and, 93–95; spatial logic of, 118; welding and, 117–18 Kubrick, Stanley, 56, 183, 184

“Imagination of Disaster, The” (Sontag), 198 Incredible Shrinking Man, The (film), 110 In Flight (Mallary), 59–60 “Inside the White Cube” (O’Doherty), 15, 191, 213–14 Insley, Will, 130, 201 Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 120 Institute of Fine Arts, New York, 35 Interstate Highway System, 10 “Interstellar Flit” (Smithson), 158 Iris Clert Gallery, 206 Iron Curtain (Christo and Jeanne-Claude), 124 “Is There Life on Earth” (Hutchinson), 201 Jacob, Marion, 57 Jameson, Fredric, 25–26, 73, 222nn16,25 Jaspers, Karl, 200, 221n74 Jean-Claude, 124 Jewish Museum, 114, 120, 172, 203 Johns, Jasper: anticipated dereliction and, 43; fate and, 41–44, 46, 59, 63; Flag and, 41–42, 44, 157; Flashlight and, 41, 42; neo-Dada and, 59; reversed ruins and, 157; Target with Four Faces and, 42, 157; Target with Plaster Casts and, 43 Johnson, Jill, 206, 234n34 Johnson, Lyndon B., 212 Johnson, Philip, 60, 62–63, 106–7 Johnson Expansion Memorial. See Gateway Arch Jones, Caroline, 144 Judd, Donald: Bontecou and, 96; Chinati Foundation and, 176–77; credibility and, 28, 163–88, 195; empty room aesthetic and, 203, 214; fate and, 60; imagination of disaster and, 130, 201; Krauss and, 165, 232n39; minimalism and, 96, 128; new monuments and, 123, 128–31, 137–39, 142– 43; monumentalism and, 17, 24, 28, 60, 96, 123, 128–31, 137–39, 142–44, 162, 163–88, 195–203, 214; Perrault on, 123, 201; politics of experience and, 197–200; reversed ruins and, 143–44, 162; “Specific Objects” and, 17, 131, 165–66, 171, 180; technology and, 182–85 Jurassic Bird (Smith), 97 Kahn, Herman, 179 Kahn, Louis, 18–19 Kaprow, Allan, 113 Kauffman, Craig, 130, 201 Kazin, Alfred, 159 Kelly, Ellsworth, 60 Kennedy, John F., 119 Kent State, 149–50 Kett, Robert, 155 Kienholz, Edward, 11, 25 Kiesler, Frederick, 105–7 Kirby, Michael, 85 Kissinger, Henry, 179 Klein, Yves, 206 Knight, Damon, 130, 201 Korea, 22, 176 Kornblee Gallery, 205 Kosuth, Joseph, 208 Kozloff, Max, 139, 183 Krannert Art Museum, 39, 112 Krauss, Rosalind, 19, 112; empty room aesthetic and, 194, 198, 213–15; fate and, 38; Judd and, 165, 232n39; material actuality and, 165; minimalism and, 198, 214, 231n18;

land art, 15, 25, 213 Lassaw, Ibram: Clouds of Magellan and, 106–7; fate and, 39, 58; Fragment from Aldebaran and, 107; Milky Way and, 106–7; religious imagery and, 58; Star Cradle and, 107; weapons and, 72, 75, 106–7; welding and, 75 last man syndrome, 26 Lee, Pamela, 132 Leja, Michael, 25 Lemay, Curtis, 17 Lennon, John, 124 Leo Castelli Gallery, 170, 206 Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke), 9 Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares (Vuchetich), 89 Le Va, Barry, 157, 207 Level 7 (Roshwald), 87 Lever (Andre), 129 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 141, 143 LeWitt, Sol, 130, 138, 198, 201 Lichtenstein, Roy, 60, 191–93, 197 Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Brown), 31 Life magazine, 60, 63, 83, 84 Lin, Maya, 188–89 Lincoln Center, 62 Lines of Wreckage in Bayonne (Smithson), 149 Lippard, Lucy, 113, 122–23, 205, 209 Lippold, Richard, 102–7 Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (Oldenburg), 11, 76, 77 Lipton, Seymour, 221n79; apotropaic animism and, 86–87, 95–96; Archangel and, 63; Defender and, 51; Earth Forge and, 87; fate and, 27, 39, 50–52, 54, 57–58, 63; The Empty Room and, 12; Herald and, 51; metal and, 50–52, 54, 111–12; Pioneer and, 96; Prophet and, 51, 54, 57; religious imagery and, 58; Sentinel and, 50–51, 57, 80, 95; weapons and, 69, 79–80, 86–87, 95–96, 111 Live-Taped Video Corridor (Nauman), 192 living memorials, 18, 120 Lloyd, Harold, 60 Look magazine, 54, 203–5 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 54 lost wax technique, 45–46 Lucite, 62 Lucky Dragon (ship), 54 Lye, Les, 138 McBride, Henry, 9 McLuhan, Marshall, 183 McNamara, Robert, 185 McPhee, John, 149 McShine, Kynaston, 114, 120 Mailer, Norman, 26 Mallarme, Stephane, 206 Mallary, Robert: Broome Street, 58, 59; Cliffhangers, 60–62, 65; gravity and, 60, 62, 65; In Flight and, 59–60; Jasper and, 221n74; metal and, 60; nuclear energy and, 221n74; Plaque, 65

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Mancusi-Ungaro, Carol, 43 Mankind in Amnesia (Velikovsky), 161 Many Headed Creature (Follet), 88 Marcuse, Herbert, 127, 183, 211–12 Marcuse Piece (Barry), 211–12, 215 Marfa, Texas, 176–77, 214 Marshall Islands, 54 Martian Chronicles (Bradbury), 26 Martian Time Slip (Dick), 73 masonry, 18, 129, 135–37 mass media, 32, 159 Mass MoCA, 214 materiality, 17, 19, 104, 166, 168–69 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 136–37, 213 Max’s Kansas City, 121 Medals of Dishonor (Smith), 72, 85 Memorial to Man (Noguchi), 99–100 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 113 metal: abstract expressionism and, 27; airplanes and, 54, 70, 75; aluminum and, 18, 63, 89, 96, 130, 169–71, 177; Andre and, 198; Bontecou and, 78–79, 84, 96; brass, 43, 104, 169, 180–81; bronze, 39, 62, 120; Butler and, 120; forged, 47; Fuller and, 89, 201; González and, 68; Grippe and, 47; Heizer and, 154; Lippold and, 103–4; Lipton and, 50–52, 54, 111–12; Mallary and, 60; molten, 52, 54, 75, 87; mottled surfaces and, 52; new monuments and, 128; patina of, 27, 41, 43, 52, 60, 69; Picasso and, 68; Roszak and, 27, 53–54, 56, 63, 75, 87, 90, 96, 223n45; rust and, 54, 60, 70, 78, 87, 89; Serra and, 138; Smith and, 54, 70–71, 75, 81–83, 86, 93, 154; Soby and, 59; Stankiewicz and, 89, 168; steel and, 88 (see also steel); strength of, 96; technical possibilities of, 58; welding and, 27, 47–48, 51–59, 64–65, 68–80, 85–97, 104, 107, 110–13, 117, 120, 130, 164, 173, 213 Meta-matics (Tinguely), 75 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 104 Meyer, James, 202–3 Michelangelo, 39, 62, 108 Michelson, Annette, 174, 183–84 military-industrial complex, 9, 185, 215 Milky Wary (Lassaw), 106–7 Miller, Henry, 12, 32–33, 47–48, 218n4 minimalism: Anastasi and, 196; Battcock and, 194; Bochner and, 202; credibility and, 164, 171–78, 182–89; empty room aesthetic and, 194–95, 198–206, 211–14; Judd and, 128; Krauss and, 214, 231n18; minatory connotations, 172–78; Morris and, 174–76, 231n17; new monuments and, 120–24, 128, 130–37; politics of experience and, 198–200; reversed ruins and, 144, 149, 151, 155; Smithson and, 202; specific object and, 67–68; weapons and, 67–68, 72, 88, 97, 102, 108, 114 “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power” (Chave), 172 Miró, Joan, 33 missiles: antiaircraft, 140; atomic, 47; Clarke and, 184; Cuban crisis and, 15, 28, 37, 165, 175, 178, 212; Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line and, 50; Eisenhower on, 115; inter-continental, 184; Kubrick and, 184; Lippold and, 105; nuclear, 185; Pynchon on, 23; Rosenquist and, 170; Roszak and, 62, 80, 90; Smith and, 83; Soviet Union and, 50; Warhol and, 206; Wiener and, 140 Mock, Elizabeth, 113 modernism: credibility and, 164, 166, 173, 182, 189; empty room aesthetic and, 191, 195; fate and, 31, 38–39, 44, 54,

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56–57; forward-looking capacity of, 31; postmodernism and, 12, 16, 44, 67–68, 86, 159, 195; reversed ruins and, 118, 132, 147, 159; weapons and, 67–74, 86, 108, 112–14 Moltke, Johannes von, 55 Mondrian, 166 monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (Flavin), 115, 121, 124 monumentalism: atomic weapons and, 9–11, 13, 17, 24; autonomy and, 19–20; catastrophe and, 9, 17; concrete and, 10, 18, 107, 115, 120–24, 149, 156; credibility and, 165; Egypt and, 35, 37, 41, 108, 126; Flavin and, 19–20, 28–29; Giedion on, 18–19; glass and, 18; humanism and, 11–12, 26; Judd and, 17, 24, 28, 60, 96, 123, 128–31, 137–39, 142–44, 162, 163–89, 195–203, 214; Kahn on, 18–19; masonry and, 18, 129, 135–37; material presence of, 17, 19, 104, 166, 168–69; metal and, 18 (see also metal); monuments and, 17–22, 26, 28, 117–18, 121, 126–35; Mumford and, 17; new, 17–18, 128, 160; Oldenburg and, 11, 19–20, 28; prospective war and, 22–24; reversed ruins and, 160; reversed trauma and, 22–24; science fiction and, 24, 26; Smith and, 7, 17, 27, 38–39, 44, 47, 48–49, 68–70, 80, 82, 87, 98, 124; Smithson and, 12 (see also Smithson, Robert); symbolism and, 19; technology and, 17, 23, 28, 185–86; Vietnam War and, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 22, 28; World War II and, 9–18, 23–29 “monument” for V. Tatlin (Flavin), 132 monuments: autonomy and, 118; conservatism and, 118–19; empty room aesthetic and, 201, 215; fate and, 35–38, 43, 46, 55, 139–43; Flavin and, 117–18, 121, 124; fluorescent light and, 121; in formation, 130–39; Heizer and, 118; ironic/irenic, 120–29; Judd’s Cold War, 185–89; living memorials and, 120; monumentalism and, 17–22, 26, 28, 117–18, 121, 126–35; Morris and, 120–21; Oldenburg and, 118, 121–26; phenomenology and, 118; race and, 26–27, 217n43; reversed ruins and, 117–53, 155, 157, 160–61; Serra and, 118; Smithson and, 118; spatial logic of, 118; weapons and, 79, 86 Monuments, Tombstone, and Trophies exhibition, 127, 129 Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, 120 Moon, The (Lippold), 104–5 Morris, Robert, 231n29; “Anti-Form” and, 219n28; credibility and, 164, 174–76, 186, 190; Crisis and, 175; empty room aesthetic and, 203, 205; Green Gallery installation and, 190, 203, 205; ironic/irenic monuments and, 120–21, 128; Lippard on, 205; minimalism and, 174–76, 231n17; monuments and, 120–21, 128, 130–31, 138; “Notes on Sculpture” and, 121, 131, 157, 158, 186, 231n17; politics of experience and, 197–200; publicness and, 121; reversed ruins and, 157, 158; Smith and, 128; Velikovsky and, 157 Morse, Samuel, 142 Mouse Museum (Oldenburg), 77 Mumford, Lewis, 17, 19 Museum of Contemporary Craft, 127 Museum of Modern Art, 28; 12 Americans catalog, 41; 15 Americans exhibition, 104–5, 108; 16 Americans exhibition, 163–64; aerial art and, 100, 102, 104, 106; Airways to Peace exhibition, 100–104; The Art of Assemblage exhibition, 59, 88; Art of the Real exhibition, 164; credibility and, 163–64, 183; empty room aesthetic and, 210, 213; The Family of Man exhibition, 28, 101; fate and, 39, 44, 56–57, 59–60; Fourteen Americans exhibition, 91; The New Sculpture exhibition, 56, 102; Power in

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power of universe and, 9; Bikini Atoll and, 53, 101; civilized barbarism and, 212; collective fear of, 196; credibility and, 165, 176–79, 183, 185–86; de-centering of subject and, 12–13; empty room aesthetic and, 196, 200, 212; existentialism and, 11; fallout and, 87; fate and, 34, 37, 54, 57–58, 60; fear and, 11, 15, 17, 23, 26, 28, 37, 54, 178–79, 183, 185, 196, 200; limited wars and, 15; Mallary and, 221n74; missiles and, 185; monumentalism and, 10–17, 23–24, 26, 28–29; Newman on, 34; reversed ruins and, 140, 143, 155, 161; revival of society and, 92; Vietnam War and, 11, 15, 155, 176–79, 185–86; World War II and, 9, 13, 167

the Pacific exhibition, 28, 101; Recent Sculpture USA exhibition, 58–59; Spaces exhibition, 210; weapons and, 76, 88, 90–91 Musil, Robert, 134–35, 145 Must We Mean What We Say (Cavell), 67 My Lai, 210 Nagasaki, 9, 33, 59 Nakian, Reuben, 63 Nauman, Bruce, 29, 191–94, 213 “Need for a New Monumentality, The” (Giedion and Kahn), 18–19 Nemerov, Howard, 55 Nevada Test Site, 155, 200 Nevelson, Louise, 201 New Jersey Turnpike, 114–15 Newman, Barnett, 218nn6,10; Broken Obelisk and, 30, 35– 41, 43–44, 57, 62, 65, 114, 126, 148, 156; credibility and, 166; empty room aesthetic and, 204; fate and, 33–38, 43–44, 57, 62, 65; Grippe and, 219n37; new monuments and, 141; “The New Sense of Fate” and, 33, 74; nuclear energy and, 34; reversed ruins and, 148, 156; Stations of the Cross and, 34, 35; weapons and, 74, 77, 114 new monumentalism, 17–18, 128, 160 new monuments: Andre and, 127, 129, 135, 137–38; antiwar movement and, 121, 124–25; apocalypse and, 130, 133; atomic energy and, 133–34; bombs and, 124; catastrophe and, 139; decay and, 129–30, 137; entropy and, 117, 130–43; fate and, 135, 139–43; Ferber and, 130; Flavin and, 128–33, 135, 138, 142; fluorescent light and, 129, 132, 135; futurological imagination and, 139; Graham and, 128–29, 135–38; Heizer and, 118; humanism and, 128–31, 135, 140–41; Judd and, 123, 128–31, 135, 140–41; minimalism and, 120–24, 128, 130–37; modernism and, 118, 132; monumentalism and, 117–18, 121, 126–35; Morris and, 120–21, 128, 130–31, 138; new, new sense of fate and, 139–43; Newman and, 141; nuclear weapons and, 140, 143; oblivion and, 133; Oldenburg and, 127–29, 135, 142–43; phenomenology and, 128, 131, 135, 137; prophetic perspective of, 22; Roszak and, 130; science fiction and, 130, 133, 141; Smithson and, 118, 127, 130–43; steel and, 119–20, 123, 128, 137, 142; symbolism and, 124; technology and, 133, 140; utopia and, 127, 138; Vietnam War and, 121; World War II and, 119, 135, 140 “New Monuments, The” (Smithson), 140 New Sculpture, The (exhibition), 56, 102 “New Sense of Fate, The” (Newman), 33, 74 Newsweek, 178, 185–86 New Yorker, 149, 159 New York Post, 175 New York School, 113 New York State Theater, 60, 62–63 New York Times, 46, 91, 149, 174, 201 Nine Nevada Depressions (Heizer), 152–57 Nochlin, Linda, 25 Noguchi, Isamu, 11, 26, 74, 80, 98–99, 100 Noland, Kenneth, 182 Nonas, Richard, 213 Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, A (Smithson), 146–47, 229n93 “Notes on Sculpture” (Morris), 121, 131, 157, 158, 186, 231n17 nuclear energy: apocalypse and, 12–13, 15–16, 26; basic

Obama, Barack, 29 objectivity, 19, 141, 168, 178, 180, 183, 187, 195 oblivion: antimonumentalism and, 126; contemporary, 72; credibility and, 164; empty room aesthetic and, 196–97, 214–15; entropic, 20; Fuller and, 16; historical, 68, 73; ideal of better society and, 24; modern, 107–15; new monuments and, 133; technology and, 133; utopia and, 16, 23, 196–97, 215; weapons and, 73, 107–15 Oculus (Smith), 66, 80–85, 93–94, 97 O’Doherty, Brian, 15, 191, 213–14 O’Hara, Frank, 94 Ohayo Wormy Butternut (Hague), 40, 41 Oldenburg, Claes: credibility and, 186; monumentalism and, 11, 19–20, 28; monuments and, 118, 121–26; new monuments and, 127–29, 135, 142–43; Placid Civic Monument and, 124–27, 135, 142–43; pop fantasies of, 129; Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway, N.Y.C. and, 122, 125; weapons and, 76, 77–79 Olitski, Jules, 182 Ominous Shadow (Ferber), 108 Ono, Yoko, 124 On Thermonuclear War (Kahn), 179 Oppenheim, Dennis, 136, 137, 158, 213 “Our Period Style” (Greenberg), 113 Palace at 4 AM (Giacometti), 109 Panofsky, Erwin, 35 Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture, The (exhibition), 38 Partially Buried Woodshed (Smithson), 116, 149–50 patina, 27, 41, 43, 52, 60, 69 Paula Cooper Gallery, 176, 209 Penultimate Truth, The (Dick), 87 Perrault, John, 123, 185, 201, 205–6 Perspecta journal, 127 “Pessimism in Science Fiction” (Dick), 92 phenomenology: aerial art and, 102; empty room aesthetic and, 194, 200–201, 206, 211, 214; monuments and, 118; new monuments and, 128, 131, 135, 137; postwar space and, 107–9, 113; weapons and, 67–68, 86, 97 Picasso, Pablo, 47, 68, 69, 71, 74, 101, 210 Pierre Matisse Gallery, 90, 112 Pietà (Michelangelo), 62 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 181–82 Pioneer (Lipton), 96 Placid Civic Monument (Oldenburg), 124–27, 135, 142–43 Planet of the Apes (film), 200 Plaque (Mallary), 65 plastic, 10, 18, 34, 60, 111 plexiglass, 63, 133, 201 Polcari, Stephen, 219n13

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Roosevelt, Franklin D., 119 Rose, Barbara, 173–74, 195 Rose, Julian, 132 Rosenberg, Harold, 41, 206, 218n12 Rosenblum, Robert, 121 Rosenquist, James, 11, 60, 170–71, 183 Roshwald, Mordecai, 87 Rosler, Martha, 25 Ross, Kristin, 26 Roszak, Theodore: aerial art and, 96; apotropaic animism and, 86–87, 90–96; credibility and, 164; expressive manner of, 72; fate and, 27, 53–57, 62, 63; Forms in Transit and, 62, 63, 80, 170; McBride on, 94; metal and, 27, 53–54, 56, 63, 75, 87, 90, 96, 223n45; missiles and, 62, 80, 90; new monuments and, 130; “The New Sculpture” symposium and, 102–3; Scavenger and, 90; Sea Sentinel (Guardians of the Sea) and, 53–54; simulated ruination and, 130; Spectre of Kitty Hawk and, 54–55, 90–92, 130, 223n55; totemism and, 92, 124; trauma of war and, 56; weapons and, 69, 72–73, 75, 80, 86–87, 90–96, 102; welding and, 27, 54–56, 75, 80, 87, 90, 92, 96, 130, 164 Rothko, Mark, 35 Rudolph, Paul, 18 Russell, Bertrand, 144, 200

Politics of Space, The (exhibition), 210 Pollock, Jackson, 10–11, 42, 72, 113, 203 Porter, Fairfield, 41, 90, 97 postmodernism, 12, 16, 44, 67–68, 86, 159, 195 Post-Monuments, Annapolis (Shain), 21 Potter, Paul, 210 Potts, Alex, 234n41 Power in the Pacific, exhibition, 28, 101 Primary Structure exhibition, 114, 120–21, 129, 172, 183, 185, 203 primitivism, 47, 52, 74–75, 77, 133 Project for a Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire (Picasso), 68–69 prophetic perspective: Anastasi and, 194–95; aerial bombardment and, 108; avant-garde and, 12; Donatello and, 114; fate and, 33, 38, 47–65; new monuments and, 22; Rimbaud and, 12, 33; surrealism and, 3; Velikovsky and, 159; World War III and, 144 Prophet (Lipton), 51, 54, 57 Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway, N.Y.C. (Oldenburg), 122, 125 Protector (Andrews), 57 Pynchon, Thomas, 23–24 Radiation Piece (Barry), 208 Raskin, David, 176 Ratcliff, Carter, 85 Rauschenberg, Robert, 59, 166, 182 Raven (Smith), 97 “Ray Guns” (Oldenburg), 77 Read, Herbert, 86, 112 Recent Sculpture USA exhibition, 58–59 Reinhardt, Ad, 38 Renaissance, 39, 62, 67, 167 resin, 59–60, 64, 65, 76, 110 reversed ruins: Andre and, 148, 151; apocalypse and, 151, 155–56; atomic energy and, 143, 153, 155, 160–61; autonomy and, 147, 159; Barry and, 157; bombs and, 140, 155, 160; catastrophic ruins and, 149–61; decay and, 145, 150, 154; entropy and, 143–45, 148–51, 153, 160–61; fate and, 143–44, 148–49, 155, 159; fear and, 151, 158; Heizer and, 152–58, 161; humanism and, 145, 151, 160; Johns and, 157; Judd and, 143–44, 162, 162; minimalism and, 144, 149, 151, 155; modernism and, 147, 159; monumentalism and, 160; Morris and, 157, 158; Newman and, 148, 156; nuclear weapons and, 143, 155, 161; science fiction and, 141, 144, 151; Smithson and, 143–53, 157–61; steel and, 153, 156; technology and, 133, 151; Vietnam War and, 155; World War II and, 144, 149 reversed trauma, 22–24, 160–61 Richards, J. M., 113 Rickey, George, 138 Riegl, Alois, 17–18, 43, 133 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 9, 12 Rimbaud, Arthur, 12, 32–33, 47 Rivera, Jose de, 39 Road to Victory, The (exhibition), 100 Robert, Hubert, 150–51 Roberts, Jennifer, 139–40, 228n67 Rock Drill (Epstein), 75, 76 Rockefeller, Nelson, 106 Rocket Launcher (Delue), 62 Rodin, Auguste, 38–39, 117 ROOMS (P.S. 1) exhibition, 213

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Saarinen, Eero, 18–19, 96, 119 Saberhagen, Fred, 201 Sagrestia Nuova, 108 Saltzman, Lisa, 189 Sandler, Irving, 41, 125–26 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12, 112, 142, 216n13 Saturo, Abe, 57 Saul, Peter, 25 Scale as Content exhibition, 37, 114 Scavenger (Roszak), 90 Schell, Jonathan, 179 Schmidt, Julius, 88 Schwitters, Kurt, 129 science fiction: credibility and, 169, 185; fate and, 52; imagination of disaster and, 200; monumentalism and, 24, 26; reversed ruins and, 130, 133, 141, 144, 151; weapons and, 72–73, 76, 86, 92, 107 Scull, Ethel, 155 Scull, Robert, 155, 230n112 sculpture: classical, 40–41, 117; credibility and, 171–72 (see also credibility); empty room aesthetic and, 191–215; monumentalism and, 9 (see also monumentalism); new monuments and, 127–43; new sense of fate in, 31–65; objecthood of, 164; reversed ruins and, 143–61; tombs and, 123–24; weapons and, 73–86. See also specific material “Sculpture and the Weapon” (Stephan), 74 “Sculpture as Environment” (Ferber), 110 Sculpture in Environment exhibition, 125–26 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (Krauss), 117 Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars (Noguchi), 99 Seagram Building, 38, 126 Sea Sentinel (Guardians of the Sea) (Roszak), 53–54 Seckler, Dorothy, 225n105 Second Law of Thermodynamics. See entropy Segal, George, 186 Seitz, William, 52 “Sentinel, The” (Clarke), 56–57 Sentinel (Lipton), 50–51, 57, 80, 95 sentinels, 47–57, 60, 62, 93, 121, 161

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Sentinels (Smith), 48, 89, 93, 96, 99–100 Serra, Richard, 118, 137–39, 156, 213 Shain, Matthew N., 21, 22 Shanken, Andrew, 18, 119–20 Shannon, Joshua, 219n25 Shaw, Lytle, 143 Shiff, Richard, 180 Sidney Guberman (Stella), 147 Sidney Janis Gallery, 113 Siegelaub, Seth, 207 Simmel, George, 145 Sinclair Oil Pavilion (1964 Worlds Fair), 63, 65 Six Sites (Anastasi), 195–97, 207, 211–12 Sloterdijk, Peter, 23 Smith, David: abstraction and, 72; Adagio Dancer and, 97; aerial art and, 96–99, 102, 107; Agricola and, 89; brutalism and, 71–72; credibility and, 168; Cubi series and, 226n3; Die and, 122, 123, 128; empty room aesthetic and, 198–202, 206; end views of, 81–82, 223n35; False Peace Spectre and, 70–71; fate and, 38–39, 44, 47–51, 54–59; Flavin and, 121; Flight and, 97; Four Soldiers and, 55, 79–80; Fry and, 81–82; futurism and, 71; gravity and, 49, 97, 99–100; Home of the Welder and, 95; Hudson River Landscape and, 98; industrial materials and, 54, 69–76, 90–93, 124; influence of, 44; Jurassic Bird and, 97; Krauss on, 93–95; Medals of Dishonor and, 72, 85; metal and, 54, 70–71, 75, 81–83, 86, 93, 154; minatory character of, 72; missiles and, 83; Morris and, 128; “The New Sculpture” symposium and, 102–3; Oculus and, 66, 80–85, 93–94, 97; The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture exhibition and, 38; Raven and, 97; Sentinels and, 48, 89, 93, 96, 99–100; Specters and, 71, 89, 91; steel and, 70–71, 75; Tanktotems and, 50, 74, 86, 87, 89–93, 96, 223n52; vision of the future and, 17; vulgarity and, 71–72, 74, 90, 92–93, 107; War Spectre and, 70; welding and, 70, 93, 96, 97 Smith, Elizabeth, 85 Smith, Tony, 114, 114–15 Smithson, Robert, 24–25; Aldiss and, 151; catastrophe and, 17, 157–59, 161; earthworks of, 19, 28, 137, 146–47, 151–53; The Eliminator and, 199; entropy and, 20, 27–28, 130–45, 148–49, 151, 153, 160–61, 201, 228n51; expanded space and, 127; Flavin and, 206; Foucault and, 12; imagination of disaster and, 130, 201; industrial materials and, 130–33, 136, 142, 145, 148; “Interstellar Flit” and, 158; Lines of Wreckage in Bayonne and, 149; minimalism and, 202; monuments and, 118; new monuments and, 20, 118, 127, 130–43; A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey and, 146–47, 229n93; Partially Buried Woodshed and, 116, 149–50; politics of experience and, 198–99; question of site and, 19; reversed ruins and, 143–53, 157–61; Roberts on, 139–40, 228n67; Spiral Jetty and, 118, 146, 148, 151–52, 202; “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic” and, 142–44, 151; Velikovsky and, 157; vision of the future and, 17; weapons and, 76; Yucatan Mirror Displacements and, 149 Smithsonian Institution, 157 Soby, James Thrall, 44, 57, 59 Soldier (Stankiewicz), 89, 92 Sontag, Susan, 198, 200–201, 209, 212 “Sousa” (Dorn), 13 Soviet Union, 50, 178–79 space: concepts of, 18, 28, 67, 97, 102–3, 107–8, 112, 120, 135, 143, 148, 198, 207; empty, 111, 113, 193, 210 (see also

empty room aesthetic); expanded, 127; gallery, 15, 113, 137, 197–98, 204–7, 209, 213; poetics of postwar, 107–15; time and, 12–13, 17, 28, 129–31, 135, 137, 143, 150, 157 Spaces exhibition, 210 “Specific Objects” (Judd), 17, 131, 165–66, 171, 180 Specters (Smith), 71, 89, 91 Spectre of Kitty Hawk (Roszak), 54–55, 90–92, 130, 223n55 Spero, Nancy, 11, 25 Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 118, 146, 148, 151–52, 202 Splitting (Matta-Clark), 136–37 Stankiewicz, Richard, 75, 88, 89, 92, 163–65, 168 Star Cradle (Lassaw), 107 Stations of the Cross (Newman), 34, 35 steel: Corten, 37, 43–44, 156; credibility and, 169, 171; empty room aesthetic and, 213; fate and, 37, 43, 48, 51; Gateway Arch and, 8, 19, 119–20; monumentalism and, 18–19, 27, 37, 43, 48, 51, 70, 75, 89, 104, 108, 119–20, 123, 128, 137, 142, 153, 156, 169, 171, 213; new monuments and, 119–20, 123, 128, 137, 142; reversed ruins and, 153, 156; Smith and, 70–71, 75; weapons and, 70, 75, 89, 104, 108 Steichen, Edward, 28, 100–104, 224n83 Steinberg, Leo, 39–44 Stella, Frank, 147 Stephan, John, 74 Stevens Institute of Technology, 75 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 31 Stockebrand, Marianne, 166 Stonehenge, 17 “Stone Place” (Saberhagen), 201 Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 176 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 210 Study for the End of the World, No. 2 (Tinguely), 200 subjectivity, 12, 43, 129, 194, 206 Subtlety, A (Walker), 20, 22 suburbs, 10, 134–35, 142, 144 Sun, The (Lippold), 104 surrealism, 33–34, 86, 90, 114, 168 “Surrealism and the War” (Newman), 33 symbolism: credibility and, 179; empty room aesthetic and, 209; monumentalism and, 19; new monuments and, 124; weapons and, 75, 82, 98, 112 Tanguy, Yves, 33, 217n5 Tanktotems (Smith), 50, 74, 86, 87, 89–93, 96, 223n52 Target with Four Faces (Johns), 42, 157 Target with Plaster Casts (Johns), 43 Tate Modern, London, 214 Tatlin, Vladimir, 121, 129, 132 technology: apocalyptic, 182–85; credibility and, 167, 170, 178, 182–87; empty room aesthetic and, 193, 196, 212; fate and, 44, 51–52, 56, 62; futurism and, 53, 92; ideal structures and, 140; industrial, 16, 75, 107; McLuhan on, 183; military, 12, 23, 50; monumentalism and, 17, 23, 28, 185–86; new monuments and, 133, 140; oblivion and, 133; Pynchon on, 23–24; rehabilitation of industrial, 16; reversed ruins and, 151; war and, 1–2, 9, 13; weapons and, 73–76, 89–92, 101, 104, 107, 109 terra-cota, 14, 45–47 Thek, Paul, 76–77, 130, 201 Them (film), 54, 73, 222n17 This Tortured Earth (Noguchi), 99 “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (Freud), 191 Three Soldiers, The (Hart), 189

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Tiger’s Eye magazine, 74 Time magazine, 52, 59, 89, 93, 172 Time of Assassins, The (Miller), 32 Tinguely, Jean, 75–76, 200–201 “To Create an Environment” exhibition, 110 Toffler, Alvin, 160 Totem (Jacob), 57 “Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, A” (Smithson), 142–44, 151 “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” (Smithson), 148 trauma: empty room aesthetic and, 196, 200, 211–12; fate and, 52, 56, 60; imagination of disaster and, 200; reversed, 22–24, 160–61; Roszak and, 56; social, 20 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 141 Truman, Harry, 9–10 Twilight Zone, The (TV series), 44 Two Blue Walls (Huot), 209 Union Carbide Building, 133–34 Untitled (Bontecou), 64, 85 untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on not seeing anyone in the room) (Flavin), 191, 193 US Air Force, 14, 17, 44 utopia: apocalypse and, 16; credibility and, 183; empty room aesthetic and, 194, 196–97, 209, 211–12, 215; Fuller on, 196; new monuments and, 127, 137; oblivion and, 16, 23, 196–97, 215; politics of experience and, 197; weapons and, 86 Vancouver Art Gallery, 186 Vanderbilt, Tom, 10 Variation Number 7: Full Moon (Lippold), 103–4 Variations within a Sphere No. 10 (Lippold), 104 Velikovsky, Immanuel, 157–61, 230n128 Velocity Piece 1: Impact Run, Energy Drain (Le Va), 207 Vidler, Anthony, 18, 23 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 188–89, 233n60 Vietnam War: antiwar movement and, 11; credibility and, 167, 174, 176–79, 185–88; death toll of, 121; debate over, 28, 167, 176; empty room aesthetic and, 210; end of US military involvement in, 15; as limited war, 11, 15; monumentalism and, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 22, 28; new monuments and, 121; nuclear weapons and, 11, 15, 155, 176–79, 185–86; political negotiations over, 174; reversed ruins and, 155; Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and, 176; televised broadcast of, 22; weapons and, 17, 155, 176 Virilio, Paul, 67, 81–82 Void, The (Klein), 206 Voyage to Crete (Nakian), 63 Vuchetich, Yevgeny, 89 vulgarity, 71–72, 74, 90, 92–93, 107 Wagner, Anne, 234n29 Walker, Kara, 20, 22 War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio), 67 Warhol, Andy, 60, 194, 201, 206, 209 War (Noguchi), 80 Warrior’s Arm (Thek), 77 Warrior (Stankiewicz), 89 War Spectre (Smith), 70

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“Way Up in the Middle of the Air” (Bradbury), 26 weapons: abstraction and, 73–86; aerial art and, 96–107; antiwar movement and, 72, 77; apocalyptic implications and, 10–12, 16, 24, 26, 33, 63, 71, 73, 90, 108, 200, 212; apotropaic animism and, 86–96; atomic, 9–11 (see also atomic energy); autonomy and, 68, 70, 103, 108; bombs and, 67 (see also bombs); Bontecou and, 77–79, 84–85, 94, 95–96; catastrophe and, 94; Cold War and, 72–73; fate and, 71–74, 88; fear and, 71, 78, 112; Ferber and, 69, 72–73, 79–86, 102, 107–11, 114; Flavin and, 114, 115; futurism and, 71, 73, 78, 86, 88, 92; Grippe and, 69, 72, 101, 107; humanism and, 67, 74; Johnson and, 106–7; Lassaw and, 72, 75, 106–7; Lipton and, 69, 79–80, 86–87, 95–96, 111; metal and, 53; minimalism and, 67–68, 72, 88, 97, 102, 108, 114; missiles and, 47 (see also missiles); modernism and, 67–74, 86, 108, 112–14; monuments and, 79, 86; Newman and, 74, 77, 114; nuclear, 10–12 (see also nuclear energy); oblivion and, 73, 107–15; Oldenburg and, 76, 77–79; phenomenology and, 67–68, 86, 97, 102, 107–9, 113; poetics of postwar space and, 107–15; Roszak and, 69, 72–73, 75, 80, 86–87, 90–96, 102; science fiction and, 72–73, 76, 86, 92, 107; sculpture as, 73–86; Smithson and, 76; steel and, 70, 75, 89, 104, 108; symbolism and, 75, 82, 98, 112; technology and, 73–76, 89–92, 101, 104, 107, 109; utopia and, 86; Vietnam War and, 17, 155, 176; World War II and, 75, 96, 200 welding: alchemical effects of, 87; constructivism and, 68; direct, 27, 47, 52–54, 60, 70, 198; Goldwater on, 75; Gonzélez and, 68; gravity and, 113; Greenberg and, 69; Holt and, 85; Krauss and, 117–18; Lassaw and, 75; metal and, 27, 47–48, 51–59, 64–65, 68–80, 85–97, 104, 107, 110–13, 117, 120, 130, 164, 173, 213; Read and, 112; Roszak and, 27, 54–56, 75, 80, 87, 90, 92, 96, 130, 164; scoring and, 56; Smith and, 70, 93, 96–97; Stankiewicz and, 75, 93; technological facets of, 65; use of torch in, 52, 56, 75, 117, 130 Weller, Allen, 39, 98, 112 White Negro, The (Mailer), 26 Whitney Museum of American Art, 77, 110, 169, 171 “Why Sculpture Is Boring” (Baudelaire), 74 Wichita House (Fuller), 89 Wiener, Norbert, 117, 140–41, 143, 228n70 Wilke, Wendell, 100–101 Willard Gallery, 55 Williams, Richard, 229n102 Williams, Tennessee, 10 Wilson, Julia Bryan, 186 Woman with Her Throat Cut (Giacometti), 98–99 World, the Flesh, and the Devil, The (film), 26 World’s Fair (1964), 60–65 Worlds in Collision (Velikovsky), 157–61 World War II: credibility and, 167; empty room aesthetic and, 200; fate and, 31, 39, 46, 58; Hiroshima and, 9, 33, 59, 157, 159; Holocaust and, 58; monumentalism and, 9, 13, 18, 23, 27; Nagasaki and, 9, 33, 59; nuclear weapons and, 9, 13, 167; reversed ruins and, 119, 135, 140, 144, 149; weapons and, 75, 96, 200 World War III, 22, 39, 144 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 113 Yucatan Mirror Displacements (Smithson), 149 Zucker, Paul, 146 Zylinska, Joanna, 27

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ARTWORK/PHOTO CREDITS

Image #334201, American Museum of Natural History Library (fig. 90)

Grey Art Gallery, New York University (fig. 49)

© 2018 Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (fig. 89)

© Peter Grippe, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (fig. 8) © Michael Heizer, photo courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery, photo Michael Heizer (fig. 65)

© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris (fig. 21)

© 2018 Michael Heizer, photo courtesy Princeton University Art Museum (fig. 67)

© 2012 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York, photo Soichi Sunami (fig. 47)

© 2018 Michael Heizer/Triple Aught Foundation, photo courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery, photo Mary Converse (fig. 66) © 2018 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (fig. 61)

© 2018 The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo Robert Murray, courtesy the Barnett Newman Foundation (fig. 3)

© 2018 Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo courtesy Kent State University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives (fig. 63)

© 2018 The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photographer unknown, courtesy the Barnett Newman Foundation (fig. 4) © 2019 Lee Bontecou (figs. 20, 34) © 2019 Lee Bontecou, digital image Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (fig. 39) © 2019 Lee Bontecou, digital image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (fig. 26)

© 2018 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (fig. 6) © 2018 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (figs. 72, 77) © 2018 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, © 2018 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo courtesy the Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, New York (fig. 91)

Photo Jack E. Boucher, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS, Reproduction number HABS DC,WASH,643-­-­13 (fig. 83) © 2018 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (fig. 5)

© 2018 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (figs. 70, 79)

Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles, California and New York, New York) records, 1959–­circa 1982, bulk 1959–­1971, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (fig. 87)

© 2018 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo Craig Rember, Judd Foundation (fig. 69)

© The Estate of Sir Jacob Epstein, photo Birmingham Museums Trust (fig. 24)

© 2018 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo Lee Stalsworth (fig. 78)

© Herbert Ferber (fig. 32)

Photo courtesy Denis Lassaw (fig. 48)

© 2018 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (figs. 85, 93)

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Civil War Photographs, LC-­DIG-­ppmsca-­32894 (fig. 82)

© 2018 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo courtesy David Zwirner, photo Dan Bradica (fig. 52)

© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein (fig. 84) The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images (fig. 64) © Estate of Richard Lippold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York, photo Soichi Sunami (fig. 46)

© 2018 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo courtesy David Zwirner, photo Stephan Wyckoff (fig. 57) Photo Samuel H. Gottscho © Gottscho-­Schleisner, 150-­35 86th Avenue, Jamaica, New York, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (fig. 45)

© Estate of Seymour Lipton, photo courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York (fig. 36) Estate of Robert Mallary (figs. 16, 18)

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© Estate of Walter De Maria, photo Walter Russel (fig. 73)

Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (figs. 15, 38)

Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art; image source: Art Resource, New York; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery/100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th/New York, NY 10011. T: 212.247.0082. F: 212.247.0402 E: info@ michaelrosenfeldart .com www.michaelrosenfeldart.com (figs. 12, 50)

© 2018 Estate of Theodore Roszak/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo courtesy New York City Parks Photo Archive (fig. 19) © 2018 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (fig. 60)

© 2018 The Estate of Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (figs. 74, 76) © 2018 The Estate of Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, © 2018 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery (fig. 88)

David Shaftel (fig. 20) Photo courtesy Matthew N. Shain (fig. 1) Robert Slifkin (fig. 9) © 2018 The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (figs. 10, 11, 23, 28, 31, 35, 41)

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (fig. 59) Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (figs. 2, 13, 17, 44, 96) Photo courtesy National Park Service, photographer unknown (fig. 53)

© 2018 Estate of Tony Smith/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (fig. 55)

© 2018 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (fig. 86)

Photo courtesy Sotheby’s (fig. 37) © 2018 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (fig. 62)

Photo O. E. Nelson (fig. 51) © 2018 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), photo Sogetsu Foundation (fig. 29)

© Ezra Stoller/Esto (fig. 58) Digital image © Whitney Museum, New York (figs. 26, 27)

© 2018 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), photo Soichi Sunami (fig. 43)

Photo courtesy Williams College Museum of Art (fig. 30) Photo courtesy the artist (figs. 94, 95, 97)

© 2018 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), photographer unknown (fig. 42) © 1969 Claes Oldenburg (fig. 25) © 1965 Claes Oldenburg, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (fig. 54) © 1967 Claes Oldenburg, New York City Parks Photo ­Archive (fig. 56) Photofest © MGM, photo Kevin Bray (figs. 80, 81) © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (fig. 22) Tom Powel Imaging, Inc. (fig. 7) Photo NL Roberts (fig. 68) © 2018 Estate of James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York (fig. 71) © 2018 Estate of Theodore Roszak/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (figs. 14, 40) © 2018 Estate of Theodore Roszak/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, digital image © The

Artwork/Photo Credits

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