For years I took Donald Judd at his word: that Minimalist objects are opposed to any pictorial illusionism or virtual space whatsoever. But is this account true to his art, let alone that of his close colleague Dan Flavin, early or late? Moreover, what is the fate of the opposition between “specific objects” and illusionist space in the aftermath of Minimalism, and the role of artists like Judd and Flavin in that story?1 In the past I have argued that Minimalism is a crux between late-modernist painting (from Barnett Newman to Frank Stella, say), which was a primary point of reference for Judd, Flavin, and peers, and postmodernist art, which sought to move beyond the traditional mediums with different materials, processes, and sites; and that central to this break was the initial posing of the specific object of Minimalism against the residual illusionism of late-modernist painting.2 Yet, however opposed to such illusionism discursively, might Minimalism also be propped up by it, bound up with it, even invested in it?
In my literalism, which was deepened by the literalism of Postminimalist practices such as process, body, and site-specific art, I did not attend to how illusionism might be preserved in Minimalism, even expanded by it (think of the reflective surfaces and refractive depths in some Judd boxes, or the brilliant color and immersive light in all Flavin lights); or, further, how illusionism might be released in the optical effects of the “light and space” art that developed with Minimalism and after (think of the reflective glass cubes of Larry Bell, the haloed light disks of Robert Irwin, the colored light ambiances of James Turrell, and so on).3 In short, if Minimalism contested the illusionistic remainder in late-modernist painting, how thoroughly did it do so, and for how long? Was its break with pictorial virtuality only partial and temporary, a historical ruse on the way to the recent triumph of the virtual (in the digital pictorialism of recent photography, say, or the projected images of recent video installations)—a triumph that is hardly restricted to art (as we have seen, it is pervasive in architecture, too)? This possibility leads me to ask whether, even as Minimalism remains a crux in twentieth-century practice, its aftermath might not also be, at least in part, a catastrophe.
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1967. Painted metal and metal cylinder mount. 24 ½ × 54 inches. Photo © 2010 Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In an early response to Judd, Rosalind Krauss questioned the terms of his literalist program. Although Judd might stipulate that a positivistic “list of physical properties” is the proper approach to his art, Krauss wrote in 1966, his individual pieces “both insist upon and deny the adequacy of such a definition”; more importantly, even as “object-art would seem to proscribe both allusion and illusion,” its appearance often involves both.4 As a case in point Krauss offered a 1965 piece by Judd, one long aluminum bar set on the horizontal and broken up at progressive intervals by short aluminum pieces painted purple (there are variants). In the first instance, as one walks along this work, it evokes both foreshortening and perspective; then, too, even as the colored bars appear to be the luminous figure against the solid ground of the aluminum bar, one sees, at either end of the piece, that the long bar is both hollow and supported by the short bars. Here as elsewhere, then, allusion and illusion are conjured by Judd, if also checked.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969. Stainless steel and Plexiglas. 33 × 68 × 48 inches. Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich. Image: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1979. Clear anodized aluminum and blue anodized aluminum. 12 × 200 × 12 inches.
According to Krauss, Judd developed this ambiguity from the late Cubi sculptures of David Smith that play with the structure of the pictorial frame: “The[se] works wed a purely optical sensation of openness (the view through the frame) that is the presumed subject of the work, with an increased sense of the palpability and substance of the frame. Smith in this way embraced the modality of illusionism within pictorial space from painting, and used this to powerful sculptural advantage.”5 Here the virtual is seen to serve as a foil for the specific, the illusionistic for the actual, and there is a related foiling in Judd, too. Yet the salient point here is the simple one that the illusionistic thereby persists in his work, and additionally so in the translucent colors of some of his Plexiglas pieces, the reflective opticality of some of his metal surfaces, and the shadowy depths of some of his stacked units.6 However, though the illusionistic is thus present in his art, it is lost in most discourse about it, his own above all. “Three dimensions are real space,” Judd states baldy in “Specific Objects.” “This gets rid of the problem of illusionism …”7
David Smith, Cubi XXVII, 1965. Stainless steel. 111⅜ × 87¾ × 34 inches. Art © Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo © David Heald.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969. Galvanized iron and Plexiglas. 120 × 27⅛ × 24 inches overall. Image: Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY.
Judd was averse to illusionism because it exemplified the exhausted conventions of traditional painting for him.8 In fact he was so averse to illusionism that he projected it away from his art and, to a lesser extent, that of Flavin, too, and so occluded its continued presence there. “They don’t involve illusionistic space,” Judd declared in 1964 of the Flavin “icons,” geometric constructions of solid colors on Masonite with electric and/or fluorescent lights attached to the surfaces or the edges, which Judd described as “blunt” (high praise for him). However, he qualified his assessment somewhat with the Flavin fluorescents that followed: “I want a particular, definite object,” Judd wrote in 1969. “I think Flavin wants … a particular phenomenon.”9 Flavin never signed on to the program of “specific objects” (for example, he rarely placed his lights flat on the floor, which his early works do not touch at all), and he was always suspicious of the term “Minimalism.” Yet both artists entertained a play between “object” and “phenomenon,” material support and illusionistic effect: in his appraisal Judd turned an oscillation within each practice into an opposition between the two.10 That said, the oscillation is more intense in Flavin, for essential to our experience of his fluorescent pieces is the rapid relay of our attention among the metal fixture, the transparent glass, the luminous gas, the extended glow of color, and the spatial diffusion of light, and he knew as much: “the composite term ‘image-object’ best describes my use of the medium” (91).11
Flavin once described this oscillation in terms of “irony”: “The radiant tube and the shadow cast by its supporting pan seemed ironic enough to hold alone” (87).12 I understand him to mean two things here: not only that the pan and its shadow might “hold” the radiance of the tube—that is, ground it physically (a grounding that contrasts with installations by Irwin and Turrell where the cause of the support is often obscured by the effect of the light), but also that his viewers might be “held” by the tension between material object and immaterial light—that is, captivated by it. Object and light thus “ironize” each other in the sense that we cannot decide for either one as primary. In this respect Flavin is more ironist than literalist, or, rather, he finds an ambiguity in literalism that “holds” both work and viewer in tension. In contradistinction to the famous maxim of Stella, what you see is not quite what you see with Flavin: our perception of his pieces changes with our position; often we see complementary colors that are not actual at all; and we cannot locate the light with much precision (Flavin once described it as “over, under, against” all at once [88]). This undecidable aspect of his work is one reason why its tension between illusionism and anti-illusionism is not a “dialectic”—a term that suggests a developmental logic foreign to Flavin as well as a possible resolution that his irony works to undercut.13
Dan Flavin, icon V (Coran’s Broadway Flesh), 1962. Oil on gesso on Masonite, porcelain receptacles, pull chains and incandescent bulbs. 41⅝ × 41⅝ inches. Photo © 2010 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.
Dan Flavin, the diagonal of may 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), 1963. 8-foot yellow fluorescent light. Photo Billy Jim © 2010 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.
Dan Flavin, untitled (to the “innovator” of Wheeling Peachblow), 1966–68. 8-foot daylight, yellow and pink fluorescent lights. Photo Billy Jim © 2010 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.
For Flavin the struggle with illusionism was chiefly a struggle to hold “the lamp as image back in balance with [the lamp] as object” (87). A version of this tension preceded his fluorescent works; in fact it was in play ever since he moved, in the late 1950s, from his fussy watercolors and drawings to his smashed tins and tools on brushy Masonite grounds, which Flavin called, in a typical riff of Joycean assonance, “plain physical factual painting of firm plasticity” (86). The mix of abstract painting and found object in these early works also attests to two forces active in advanced art of the time: like others in his milieu, Flavin was much impressed by Newman, who later befriended him (it was also the Minimalists who first acclaimed Newman as a master), and Flavin could not avoid the impact of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose lineage was traced by the 1961 exhibition, “The Art of Assemblage,” held at the Museum of Modern Art while Flavin worked there as a guard. Curated by William Seitz, this show included a great variety of things—Cubist and Futurist collages, Dadaist objects, late-Surrealist and Art-Brutish works—most of which were seen through the contemporaneous practice of Neo-Dada and Nouveau Réaliste assemblages. Either Newman or Johns (whom Flavin preferred to Rauschenberg) might have led him to extrude pictorial space into actual space, but altogether this “crush of avant-gardism” made the move irresistible to him (192).
However, a chief motive of this move was not represented in the Seitz show or elsewhere in New York in 1961: the Constructivism of Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko. This precedent first came to Flavin by way of a book published in 1962, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922 by the English art historian Camilla Gray (it was also important to Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt, who alerted Flavin to its publication). Among other images of the Russian avant-garde, Gray illustrates the passage in Tatlin from his semi-Cubist paintings, via the constructions of Picasso, to his early reliefs like Bottle (1913), and then on to his abstract corner and counter reliefs as well as his celebrated model for the Monument to the Third International (1919-20). Three years later, in 1965, Flavin looked back on this Constructivist project as the newfound basis of his own “proposal”:
This dramatic decoration has been founded in the young tradition of a plastic revolution which gripped Russian art only forty years ago. My joy is to try to build from that “incomplete” experience as I see fit. Monument 7 in cool white fluorescent light memorializes Vladimir Tatlin, the great revolutionary, who dreamed of art as science. It stands, a vibrantly aspiring order, in lieu of his last glider, which never left the ground (84).
The statement is suggestive in several ways. Nearly in neo-avant-garde terms (though this concept was not yet available as such), Flavin sees his proposal as a postwar recovery of an “incomplete” project of a prewar avant-garde; by the same token he does not deny the drastic differences in historical conditions.14 The Tatlin project was part of a revolutionary transformation in art and society alike, and it commemorated a new political order; the Flavin proposal is for a “dramatic decoration,” a far more modest ambition, and it pays homage not to an entire society in the making, but to a failed artist who had withdrawn into the romantic vision of his late man-propelled glider, Letatlin (1929–31). This recovery, then, connects to a retreat in the Constructivist program, and, like the glider, the fluorescent pieces do remain at the threshold between the aesthetic and the utilitarian, the virtual and the real.
This tension between the illusionistic and the actual runs deep in modernist art, where it might attest to the old antinomy between idealism and materialism in modern culture at large.15 The tension is in play, for example, in Constantin Brancusi, who, along with the Russians, was a signal precedent for the Minimalists (Flavin dedicated his breakthrough piece, the diagonal of may 25, 1963, to the Romanian artist); it is also in play in another key predecessor, Jackson Pollock, especially in the drip paintings that starkly juxtapose the opticality of line and color with the materiality of paint and canvas. Of course, some artists, such as Morris Louis, elaborated the optical term in Pollock, while others, such as Allan Kaprow, developed the material term, while still others, such as Flavin, attempted to do both at once.16 The tension between the illusionistic and the actual is also immanent in the two models of the object with which Flavin associated his art: “the icon” and “the fetish.” Of course, his interest in these categories was hardly novel—among others, Tatlin and Malevich were drawn to Russian icons, and Picasso and Matisse to African fetishes—but Flavin inflects them in distinctive ways. He used the first term as the rubric for his early paintings with attached lights: “I had to start from that blank, almost featureless, square-fronted construction with obvious electric light which could become my standard yet variable emblem—the ‘icon’ ” (87). Less often he applied the second term to his fluorescent lights, which he called, in an apparent oxymoron, “modern technological fetishes” (87).
Vladimir Tatlin, model of the Monument to the Third International, 1919–20. Wood. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Dan Flavin, “monument” 7 for V. Tatlin, 1964. White flourescent lights. 10 feet high. Photo Billy Jim © 2010 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.
In her book on the Russian avant-garde, Gray illustrates, near the Tatlin reliefs, a late-fifteenth-century icon, a Descent from the Cross, which she attributes to the “Northern School of Russia.” Flavin bought this book on August 21, 1962 (the purchase is recorded in his notebooks), but he might have looked through it previously, for two or three weeks earlier he had made a trip to the Metropolitan Museum where (as reported in a note of August 9) he experienced an epiphanic encounter with a Russian icon:
Last week, in the Metropolitan, I saw a large icon from the school of Novgorod. I smiled when I recognized it. It had more than its painting. There was a physical feeling in the panel. Its recurving warp bore a history. This icon had that magical presiding presence which I have tried to realize in my own icons. But my icons differ from a Byzantine Christ held in majesty; they are dumb—anonymous and inglorious. They are as mute and indistinguished as the run of our architecture. My icons do not raise up the blessed saviour in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light (83).17
Russian (Novgorod?) painter, Christ in Glory, late fifteenth century. Tempera on wood. 42⅛ × 30⅞ inches. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.
This rich statement suggests what Flavin needed to “recognize” at this juncture. The icon impresses him with its “physical feeling” and its “magical presence” alike, both of which its very age seems to bear into the present through a “recurving warp.” This last phrase points to an experience of historicity that is nonetheless overcome, of an artifact whose distance is declared and surmounted at the same time, precisely because Flavin feels such an affinity with it. Clearly he is taken by the ritualistic power of the Russian icon, as was Malevich before him, or (for that matter) as was Picasso with the African fetish.18 Flavin wants to recover some of this magic for his art, though he is well aware of the different conditions under which he works: despite his Catholic upbringing (Flavin was once expected to become a priest), there is no “blessed saviour” for him, only “barren rooms.” Yet, in a further twist, it is this very duality of the “magical” and the “physical” in the icon that is important to him. For example, of icon V (Coran’s Broadway Flesh) (1962), Flavin remarked in 1963, “I have tried to infect my icon with a blank magic that is my art” (83).
Perhaps a reading of Tatlin in his own moment will clarify this modernist connection with the icon. “Let us remember icons,” the Latvian artist and critic Vladimir Markov wrote in 1914, with early Tatlin constructions such as Selection of Materials (1914) in mind. “They are embellished with metal halos, metal casings on the shoulders, fringes and incrustations; the painting itself is decorated with precious stones and metals, etc. All of this destroys our contemporary conception of painting.”19 In this modernist account of the icon, its “physical feeling” (as Flavin puts it) breaks with any illusion of the real world in order to conduct “the people to beauty, to religion, to God” (as Markov puts it).20 The Tatlin constructions, Markov suggests, retain this anti-illusionism but reverse its thrust in such a way that the viewer is directed not toward a transcendental realm of God but toward an immanent “culture of materials” (as Tatlin calls his Constructivism). Flavin works to hold on to both vectors, the transcendental and the immanent; equally affected by the Novgorod icon and the Tatlin constructions, he positions his work in the space between them, in the intermediate world of “blank magic” that they define.
Vladimir Tatlin, Selection of Materials, 1914 (no longer extant). Iron, glass, stucco, asphalt.
A year earlier, in 1913, Markov had also written about African sculptures or “Negro fetishes” (as such sculptures were often called then) as another implicit model, via Picasso, for the new Russian art, and he noted that these very material objects (he describes them as “architectural constructions with only a mechanical linkage”) nevertheless carry a profound “spiritual conviction.”21 Here Markov intuits a duality of the physical and the metaphysical that was long a staple of discourse on the fetish, a term used by early modern European traders (first Portugese, then Dutch) for West African objects of worship: for its celebrants (the Europeans believed) the fetish is a god, not a representation of one—the divinity resides in the thing.22 When Flavin alludes to his fluorescent pieces as “fetishes,” it is this duality of “the physical” and “the magical” that is highlighted.
Again, Flavin holds other dualities in tension, too, such as the utilitarian and the aesthetic: “I can abuse lighting in a sufficiently useful way and still accomplish what I regard as art,” he once commented.23 Supplied by “any hardware store” (91), fluorescent lights were placed in the early 1960s, as they are still today, in workaday spaces: factories, offices, lunchrooms, subways, train stations. (In 1976–77 Flavin installed a row of lights on three platforms at Grand Central Station, where they remained for a decade, unseen as art by most passersby.) Of course, they are also used commercially, in which case the unnatural colors often appear gaudy; in fact, beyond workaday, the lights can be tacky, and Flavin did not shy away from this association either: he once remarked that the fluorescents might evoke “a Brooklyn Chinese restaurant.”24 Sometimes his incandescent icons even suggest a campy side (with its fleshy tint and flashy lights, Coran’s Broadway Flesh was titled in homage to “a young English homosexual who loved New York City” [83]).
On the one hand, then, Flavin held that “there is no room for mysticism in the Pepsi denigration” (another of his pungent phrases); “my fluorescent tubes never ‘burn out’ desiring a god” (94). Mel Bochner agreed with this assessment: “Any attempt to posit the objects with a transcendent nature is disarmed by the immediacy of their presence,” he wrote in fall 1966.25 On the other hand, the lights can also be glorious, and the effects ecstatic; Flavin used the latter term in its literal sense of quasi-religious transport (ex-stasis, taken out of self, out of world). Here, then, is another irony of different associations held together in tension to “disarm” the viewer: evocations of train stations on the one hand and of transcendental spaces on the other (Flavin designed lights for a church in Milan, finally realized in 1997, a year after his death).26
Dan Flavin, Untitled, 1976–77. White flourescent lights on Tracks 18–19, 39–40 and 41–42, Grand Central Terminal, New York. Photo © 2010 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.
Flavin also engages other oppositions, such as materiality and immateriality and immediacy and mediation, oppositions that were in play everywhere in advanced art of the 1960s, and often enough he seemed to speak for both sides. On the one hand, Flavin claimed, “the physical fluorescent light tube has never dissolved or disappeared by entering the physical field of its own light” (91); on the other hand, he admitted, the “brilliance” of the light can “somewhat betray its physical presence into approximate invisibility” (91). Once more Flavin wants to hold the different effects in tension: “Regard the light and you are fascinated—practically inhibited from grasping its limits at each end. While the tube itself has an actual length of 244 cm [eight feet], its shadow, cast from the supporting pan, has but illusively dissolving ends. This waning cannot really be measured without resisting consummate visual effects” (87). Yet this tension is difficult to maintain, and frequently his works appear less site-specific than site-erosive, with the light so bright as to dematerialize both support and space, to render them “approximately invisible.” An “8-foot fluorescent light pressed into a vertical corner,” Flavin acknowledged about pieces like pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns) (1963), “can entirely eliminate the definite structure” (87).
This effect leads me to my primary claim: already with Flavin the apparent anti-illusionism of Minimalism begins to be trumped, transformed into an expanded field of illusionism, or, more precisely, with Flavin this trumping becomes available and, for some artists, desirable.27 This line out of Minimalism, then, moves beyond the frame of painting and off the pedestal of sculpture into a realm less of specific objects than of a pictorial space writ large, bound only by the architectural limits of gallery or museum. From this perspective Flavin does not negate illusionism so much as he extrudes it into space; it is a “reversed illusionism” (as Dan Graham once called it).28 Such installations of colored light, Krauss wrote as early as 1969, have “the simultaneous depth and physical inaccessibility of illusionistic space” and thus “bear on the conventions of painting.”29 And, indeed, more intensely than any painter, Flavin mixes color in our eyes, and, more boldly than any practitioner of collage or assemblage, he treats actual space as an element in a three-dimensional composition. At such moments in his work the literal does not counter the illusionistic so much as it is subsumed by it, and Flavin can be taken to prompt not only an utter abstraction of the pictorial (this was largely achieved by Pollock and others) but its outright atomization.30 If Minimalism is “neither painting nor sculpture” for Judd, it begins to be both- and with Flavin, with each category transformed in the process—painting pushed to the optical, and sculpture to the spatial.31 This revises the common understanding of Minimalism fundamentally, for, if seen thus, it inaugurates not only a move from illusion into space but also a refashioning of space as illusion. And yet, though Flavin points the way here, he does not follow it, at least not fully.32
“As I have said for several years,” Flavin wrote in 1966, “I believe that art is shedding its vaunted mystery for a common sense of keenly realized decoration. Symbolizing is dwindling—becoming slight. We are pressing downward toward no art—a mutual sense of psychologically indifferent decoration—a neutral pleasure of seeing known to everyone” (89). Eccentric though Flavin could be, here he conforms to central tendencies in neo-avant-garde practice: toward the anti-auratic and the anti-symbolic, the indifferent and the neutral—in short, toward a zero degree of art. However, as we have seen, he did not want to shed “vaunted mystery” altogether; nor was “decoration” a slight to him, as it was to most abstract artists from Kandinsky, Mondrian, and others in the 1910s and 1920s to Greenbergian painters like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in the 1950s and 1960s. For decoration is valued negatively only if abstraction is pledged absolutely to medium-specificity and/or aesthetic autonomy, and for Flavin it was not. “At times,” he said of his icons, “they may be lamp blocks losing their identity to a greater ensemble”; and of his fluorescents he commented, “the lights are integrated with the spaces around them” (82, 89). For Flavin, art as decoration hovered not only between use and non-use but also between discrete work and architectural ensemble.
Dan Flavin, pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns), 1963. 8-foot pink fluorescent light. Photo Billy Jim © 2010 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.
This is one reason that Flavin refused any connection with “the term ‘environment’ ”: “It seems to me to imply living conditions and perhaps an invitation to comfortable residence. Such usage would deny a sense of direct and difficult visual artifice” (95). Despite his move into actual space, then, he wanted to retain the punctual intensity, the emphatic presentness, of late-modernist painting: “I intend rapid comprehensions—get in and get out situations. I think that one has explicit moments with such particular light-space” (95). And, for good and for bad, his conception of art as decoration does offer the optical effects of a late-modernist painting by Jules Olitski, say, or Larry Poons in the spatial medium of colored light, along the lines that Irwin, Turrell, and others would also pursue: “Regard the light, and you are fascinated.”33
Flavin achieves this presentness through the brilliance of his lights, to be sure, but also through the structure of his arrangements. In the style of the period he associated his “system” of regular units with language, and in contradistinction to much Minimalist art he insisted that it was not durational in effect: “it is as though my system synonymizes its past, present and future states” (90). This is a strong claim, but it is mostly borne out: even though our perception of a Flavin fluorescent changes in time (as we walk about it, as its colors irradiate one another, and so on), it appears to be present all at once, and, as an arrangement of units, each work can be understood as implicit in all the others, too. Two of his terms for this mode of appearance are “declaration” and “divulgation”; the latter is another term that evokes a semi-religious “revelation” (importantly, to the vulgus or common people). In some ways, then, the intensity of this presentness is at odds with the ironies of his art noted above: whereas intensity “fascinates,” irony keeps us on edge, even off balance, looking, thinking, moving.
Suspicious of “environmental” art, Flavin was contemptuous of “technological” art, which, in 1967 (in the heyday of enterprises like “Experiments in Art and Technology”), he dismissed as so many “concoctions of theatrical ritual, of easy, mindless, indiscriminate sensorial abuse” (93). In particular he decried “a quasi-fetishistic reverence for technological emanations [presented] as art itself” (93).34 Yet clearly there is a technological dimension in his work, too, which, again, Flavin also aligned with the fetish: “A common lamp becomes a common industrial fetish,” he wrote in 1964, “as utterly reproducible as ever but somehow strikingly unfamiliar now” (83).
Less religious than commercial, the fetish evoked here is the commodity fetish, which, in the Marxist account, we endow with a power that it does not possess because, separated as we are from its production, we do not understand its workings. The difference between his two inflections above is that the fluorescent lights are “industrial fetishes” that, though “unfamiliar” as art, are familiar as objects, while the “emanations” of technological art, because they are obscure in manufacture, effect a “quasi-fetishistic reverence” (Marx wrote of the commodity in similar terms in Capital). In a sense the difference is between “blank magic” and black magic, and once more Flavin seems to want it both ways: a defetishized object that is transparent in production (another Constructivist desideratum, as we saw with Richard Serra) and a fetishistic object that is magical in effect. Perhaps Flavin sensed a common ground with viewers on both counts, with his fluorescent pieces at once readable as “common lamps” (as with the self-evident materials in Tatlin, say) and consumable as “reproducible fetishes” (as with the mass-produced images in Warhol, say).
What does all this have to do with the catastrophe of Minimalism mentioned at the outset? I mean the term in its etymological sense, as a down-turning (kata-strophe), which is to say, less as an outright disaster than as a problematic redirection. In my view such a catastrophe of Minimalism follows on Flavin with Irwin, Turrell, and others. This is not to deny the powerful effects of these artists, only to suggest that they elaborated Minimalism in ambiguous ways, especially in the categories of “environmental” and “technological” art that disturbed Flavin.35
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1962–63. Oil on canvas. 83 × 84 inches. Photo © Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY © 2010 Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Even as the Minimalist work might open on to ambient space, its material definition is clear enough. Not so with Irwin: even his initial paintings in this optical mode—such as his near squares of monochromes divided by thin horizontals (1962–64) and made up of small dots (1964–66)—tend to dissolve the physicality of both surface and support. To recall the distinction posed by Judd, Irwin is interested in the phenomenon more than the object, and the two soon fall out of tension in his work. Indeed, like Turrell, Irwin pursues the phenomenon to the other side of painting and object alike, where both are diffused into light and space.36
Trained as a painter, Irwin pursued the modernist critique of the pictorial logic of figure and ground—in his own words, of the “abstract hierarchy of mark, frame, and meaning”—to the point of a break with painting as such.37 This trajectory can be traced in the passage from his early line and dot paintings, through his haloed disks in painted aluminum or plastic (1965–69) and his prismatic columns in cast acrylic (1969–70), to his many installations, both interior and exterior, over the last four decades. For Irwin this move was driven by the philosophical imperative not to “mix up the objects of art with the subject—‘art.38’ ” Further, he understood this subject of art not in epistemological terms (as some Conceptualists did) but in phenomenological terms (as most Minimalists did). “The nexus of modern thought,” Irwin states, is “being phenomenally in the world as an active participant,” such that “the one pure subject of art” is “the nature and infinite potential of human beings to see and to aesthetically order the world.”39 This became his own goal: “I was after a first order of presence,” Irwin once commented, and in his view his select predecessors—“Husserl’s phenomenological ground, Malevich’s pure desert, and Reinhardt’s art-as-art”—were so directed as well.40 Here, in effect, Irwin rewrites modernist abstraction as phenomenology tout court, and this rewriting throws the import of the art event utterly on to the viewer, who is “actively charged with completing the full intent of the work of art—experientially.”41
Already in 1966 Phil Leider saw the risks of this project (even as he also supported it): the object of art might disappear in the pursuit of its “pure subject,” and the critique of the pictorial might lead, paradoxically, to “the reintroduction of an ambiguous, atmospheric space.”42 Advanced by Irwin, these two possibilities came to pass with Turrell. “This is not Minimalism and it is not Conceptual work,” he once commented of his art; “it is perceptual work.” And further: “There is no ‘object’ because perception itself is the object.”43 A student of psychology long interested in Gestalt theory (especially its technique of Ganzfeld or “entire field” perception), Turrell began with “projection pieces” (1966–69) that cast light across a corner of a gallery in such a way that a cube seems to hover there. He then followed with “shallow space constructions” that produce screens of colored light through slight openings in gallery walls backed by oblique planes that are brilliantly illuminated—and almost impossible to locate as a result. These installations, which soon became immersive, appear to exist less as fixed entities than as spatial phantoms projected by our retinal apparatus and nervous system. In this way Turrell tends to reverse the Minimalist move to produce delineated spaces and reflexive viewers; rather, his environments often disorient us, even overwhelm us, with the very apparitions we seem to call into being. This diffuse aestheticism has great appeal, but it can also be seen as a sublimated abstraction of luminous forms of mediated spectacle on offer elsewhere in contemporary culture, and the appreciative response of most viewers is not too distant from the “quasi-fetishistic reverence for technological emanations” that Flavin questioned.
Robert Irwin, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue, 2006–07. Urethane paint over lacquer on aircraft honeycomb aluminum. Six panels, each ca. 16 × 22 feet. Photo © 2010 Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Like Irwin, Turrell understands the aesthetic in the original sense of its Enlightenment definition—that is, as a “science of sensitive knowing” vis-à-vis the natural world at large.44 Phenomenology is also concerned with our perception of this world, and the pursuit of the aesthetic beyond the given mediums of art renewed interest in this philosophy. In phenomenology the world is bracketed in such a way that what is primary in our experience comes to the fore. Yet the spaces engineered by Irwin and Turrell for such perception are entirely artificial, and “sensitive knowing” in this context is utterly mediated. The danger here is not only to dehistoricize the aesthetic (this might be intrinsic to the category) but also to render the phenomenological faux—indeed to replace both the aesthetic and the phenomenological with ersatz versions in which perception is, as it were, done for us.45 This is to suggest, again, that a reversal occurs here. In principle these installations are pledged to our experience: “An experience is not framed so much as a situation is made in which experience can be created,” Turrell insists; and he conceives this experience in expressly phenomenological terms: “As you plumb a space with vision, it is possible to ‘see yourself see.’ This seeing, this plumbing, imbues space with consciousness.”46 Yet, as it does so, Turrell also claims, the space becomes “like an eye”: “Space has a way of looking. It seems like it has a presence of vision. When you come into it, it is there, it’s been waiting for you.” The “situation” thus switches from the reflexivity of “seeing yourself see” to the alienation of “space is somehow seeing.”47
Historically, interest in phenomenology intensifies when perception is pressured by developments in technology and media. “He manages above all to stay clear of that experience from which his own philosophy evolved or, rather, in reaction to which it arose,” Walter Benjamin remarked of Henri Bergson, the philosopher of élan vital much acclaimed in the early 1900s (and again today). “It was the alienating, blinding experience of the age of large-scale industrialism. In shutting out this experience, the eye perceives a complementary experience—in the form of its spontaneous afterimage, as it were.”48 A similar argument also holds for Edmund Husserl, whose famous epoche or “phenomenological reduction” seems all but designed to bracket such conditions as “large-scale industrialism,” or, indeed, for Heidegger, who insisted on a primordial order of being against the “world picture” that modernity had put in its place (at least he was explicit about his reaction). Finally, Merleau-Ponty, the greatest phenomenologist after Husserl, can be seen to respond, also in a complementary, even compensatory manner, to the imminent rise of consumer society and media culture. Explored by Pop art, this world is suspended in his phenomenological approach, which was key to some Minimalists (who read his Phenomenology of Perception upon its translation into English in 1962). Also influenced by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Irwin and Turrell bracket this mediated world, too, but to the extent that they do so their art might also be its “spontaneous afterimage”—an emanation of the very technology that they both exploit and efface.49
We might grasp what is at stake here, aesthetically and politically, by recourse to a famous anecdote told by Tony Smith in 1966; a primal scene in discourse about Minimalism and its aftermath, it concerns a nighttime ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in the early 1950s. Smith recounts his strange exhilaration in this dark landscape, which he deemed artificial but not-quite-artistic, “mapped out but not socially recognized.”50 His was an aesthetic feeling, he is confident, but one beyond any feeling produced by a painting or a sculpture: “There is no way you can frame it,” Smith remarked, “you just have to experience it.”51 Anticipated by the vast freeway in New Jersey, this expanded field of art is accomplished with such massive projects as the Roden Crater in Arizona fashioned by Turrell. Certainly this field seems to be well beyond the pictorial and the sculptural—but might these categories only be extended here in an apparently frameless beyond, an immense space of rarefied pictoriality that is technologically manufactured in order to appear perceptually pure? Such spaces do not exceed the conventional frames of art so much as they stretch these frames beyond our capacity to locate them, with the effect that we stand within a pictorial-sculptural field write large, positioned there as both subject and object, framer and framed in one.52
Intentionally or not, the Smith anecdote rehearses the two-step operation of the sublime as formulated by Kant in The Critique of Judgment (1790): a first moment in which the subject is overwhelmed, emotionally, by the sheer scale of the scene or force of the event, followed by a second moment in which the subject recoups, intellectually, such feelings of awe and dread and, in this recouping, enjoys a great rush of personal power.53 Yet, in the art under discussion, this sublime is highly constructed, often supported by intensive interventions of capital, technology, and labor that serve to aestheticize the natural and to naturalize the aesthetic. However, for the most part, these interventions are played down, or even made to disappear, with the result that the prepared scene appears immaculate to us and we immediate to it.54 In this regard the second moment of this aesthetic techno-sublime recalls “the oceanic feeling” once described by Freud as a “limitless narcissism in the guise of a loss of ego,” wherein the ego communes with its own exhilaration, which it mistakes for the grandeur of the art.55
In search of correlatives of his experience on the turnpike, Smith mentions “abandoned airstrips in Europe” and then, without a hitch in his discourse, a “drill ground in Nuremberg large enough to accommodate two million men.”56 I mention this allusion not to contaminate the expanded field of art after Minimalism with the stagings of Nazi spectacle, but to point to the political manipulations of the sublime in twentieth-century history at large. Intimated here is that the expanded field of aesthetic experience cannot be removed from such spectacles as Fascist rallies, which Benjamin already described in terms of “the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology.”57 In short, Smith allows us to glimpse that the crux of Minimalism prepared not only a progressive desublimation of painting and sculpture into practices that open on to actual space and everyday life, but also a problematic resublimation of the pictorial and the sculptural—a resublimation in which conventional frames of art might be transgressed in a first moment, only to be replaced by mediated formats that appear transparent in a second moment. Again, what is thereby delivered are sensations of intensity that, though once novel in the realm of art, have become almost normative in spectacle culture at large, to which such art, whatever its intentions, serves as an alibi or ally.58
Benjamin already noted the effect of immediacy-through-mediation in the cinema of the 1930s: “The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice.”59 With many advances in image-technologies, this effect has become all the more complete since his time. To its credit, some of the art in question here works to engage this cultural given rather than to evade it, but, again, its immersive installations, in which body, image, and space often seem to exist in one continuum, tend to purify the artifice rather than to redirect it. Implicit in Flavin, this effect is furthered by Turrell and others who offer an experience of great immediacy achieved through a process of intensive mediation. Benjamin termed this artifice-reality the “blue flower in the land of technology”; he also called it “dream kitsch.”60 If Turrell is one master of this mode, another is Bill Viola, whose image installations work to convert video into a medium of spiritual transformation. Viola might expose his technological set-ups, but he does so in the service of his blue-flower effect, not in opposition to it. Another master of this mode is Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive environments aim to render natural and technological worlds all but synthetic—or rather, to demonstrate that this condition is already the case, that nature is but a “weather project,” and that phenomenological experience is now given as mediated.61 Eliasson also reveals the construction of his environments, but this “alienation-effect” or “laying-bare of the device” now contributes to the artifice, just as our participation now contributes to the spectacle, rather than the opposite. In such work binaries that have structured our discourse on art since Minimalism—of the illusionistic and the literal in Judd, or the absorptive and the theatrical in Michael Fried, or even the participatory and the spectacular in subsequent criticism—appear to collapse or to be otherwise undone.62
Bill Viola, The Messenger, 1996. Color video projection with amplified stereo sound. 25 × 30 × 32 feet. Durham Cathedral. Photo Kira Perov.
Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003–04. Multi-media installation. Tate Modern, London. Photo © Tate, London / Art Resource, NY.
