Title: Richard Serra

Essay by Lynne Cooke

Concerns quintessentially sculptural have engaged Richard Serra for more than thirty years, although as a young artist in New York in the late 1960s he was strongly affected by the work of a number of contemporary dancers, above all Yvonne Rainer. Such work prompted him to consider "ways of relating movement to material and space," he has explained, in that it allowed him "to think about sculpture in an open and extended field in a way that is precluded when dealing with sculpture as an autonomous object. . . . I found very important the idea of the body passing through space, and the body's movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement."1 A visit to a number of Zen gardens in Kyoto while on a trip to Japan in 1970 reinforced Serra's growing preoccupation with work that was defined through the processes of its reception. There he discovered that "your vision is peripatetic and not reduced to framing an image. It includes and is dependent upon memory and anticipation. . . . The relationship of time, space, walking, and looking—particularly in arcs and circles—constitutes the only way you can see certain Japanese gardens." more

Title: Modernist Painting

Essay by Clement Greenburg

Modernism includes more than art and literature. By now it covers almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture. It happens, however, to be very much of a historical novelty. Western civilization is not the first civilization to turn around and question its own foundations, but it is the one that has gone furthest in doing so. I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist. more


Operation Atropos

Coco Fusco

To some people political art means protest art: slogan-slinging, name-calling, didacticism, an unaesthetic thing. But in the trauma-riddled early 21st century, after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, with a continuing war in Iraq, political art can be something else: a mirror. more

Barbara Kruger at the Whitney Museum

Author: Raphael Rubinstein

Back in late August, as I was about to begin this piece, I read a line in another critic's review of Barbara Kruger's retrospective that convinced me to put off writing about the show for several months. At the end of a perceptive review in the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz posed a question to Kruger skeptics: "In four months, we could elect another Bush as president. If so, who you gonna call?" Yes, I thought, one's evaluation of Kruger's work might indeed be colored by the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. This, after all, is an artist whose work came to maturity in the early years of Reagan's first term, and who subsequently pursued a critique of the rightward turn of American politics, as well as targeting sexism and violence.more

Sentences on Conceptual Art ( 1969)

Essay by Sol Lewitt

 

  1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
  2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
  3. Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
  4. Formal art is essentially rational.
  5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
  6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results. more