America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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The transformed consumer landscape of the 1960s opened up tremendous possibilities for artists. Rather than carving or modeling by hand, sculptors could take plans to fabricators and have works produced to commercial standards with industrial processes. Suddenly a vast range of new materials was readily available, including neon, latex, lead, resin, and Plexiglas. The factory became a studio and the hardware store a source of art supplies.

The artists who came to be known as Minimalists, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, used these new materials and production processes to pursue simple geometric forms with high finishes and to work on a new scale midway between the human and the architectural. The resulting sculpture emphasized the relationships among the viewer’s body, the work, and the environment, encouraging the viewer to focus on the complexities of perceptual experience. At the same time, other artists explored these issues in shaped canvases and reliefs that toyed with the sometimes strange relationship between actual physical experience and spatial illusionism, as in Al Loving’s Rational Irrationalism.

The rigid geometries of these works were followed by a response from artists who sought to use the new materials in more spontaneous ways that captured the sense of making art as an active process subject to forces like gravity or the movement of the artist’s body. In 1969, the Whitney included many of these figures—Eva Hesse, Rafael Ferrer, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier—in the exhibition of Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. The exhibition also included contemporary music, dance, and visual art as captured in videos of Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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An installation of 3 large L-shaped blocks in a gallery.

Robert Morris’s deceptively simple sculpture Untitled (3 Ls) presents us with a subtle perceptual puzzle. Although its three elements are identical in shape, they appear different from one another based on their varying orientations. This allows us to view the same form simultaneously from multiple perspectives, so that the act of seeing becomes an implicit subject of Morris’s work. This effect is heightened as we move around the sculpture, becoming aware of how our response to it is affected by our bodily position. Morris was one of the founding figures of Minimalism in the 1960s, a movement that became known for its stark forms and industrial materials, as well as its rejection of traditional artistic techniques such as modeling and casting. The repeated elements of Morris’s sculpture invoke the processes of commercial manufacture, like so many products from an assembly line. Yet the artist has indicated that the three units may be configured differently for each space in which they are presented, thereby introducing an element of play that counteracts the work’s otherwise inert and imposing forms.

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America Is Hard to See

Rational Irrationalism

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ROBERT MORRIS (B. 1931), UNTITLED (3 LS), 1965, REFABRICATED 1970

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Rational Irrationalism

18

ROBERT MORRIS (B. 1931), UNTITLED (3 LS), 1965, REFABRICATED 1970

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection