Like Andy Warhol
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98 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 11.
99 Bochner, “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 101.
100 “This Is a Novel or a Stopwatch,” in Elsewhere, ed. Mary Ceruti (New York: Sculpture Center, 2000).
101 I am thinking of Foucault’s argument about Magritte’s work, which, Foucault argues, functions like an “unraveled calligram” (This Is Not a Pipe).
102 “Commentaries,” in Sol LeWitt, ed. Alicia Legg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 81.
103 Ibid.
104 LeWitt, in conversation with author and Nicholas Baume, August 9, 2000.
105 “The Music of Forgetting,” in Baume, Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, 24.
106 Kant’s examples are mostly from nature—mountains, the Milky Way, a huge sea storm. The classic art historical representation of the sublime would be those Turner paintings of a very small boat in a huge sea, or the paintings by the Hudson River School of small people in the midst of an immense valley or mountain setting. Here is Kant’s description of the phenomenon: “[What happens is that] our imagination strives to progress towards infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so [the imagination,] our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power; and what is absolutely large is not an object of sense, but is the use that judgment makes use naturally of certain objects so as to [arouse] this (feeling), and in contrast with that any other use is small. Hence what is to be called sublime is not the object, but the attunement that the intellect [gets] through a certain presentation that occupies reflective judgment… . Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.” Critique of Judgment, trans. Pluhar, 106 (Pluhar’s emphasis).
107 Sianne Ngai, “Stuplimity: Boredom and Shock in 20th Century Aesthetics,” Postmodern Culture 10, no. 2 (January 2000): 14.
108 LeWitt, “Paragraphs,” 79.
109 Benjamin, “Image of Proust,” SW2, 240.
110 LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” in LeWitt: Critical Texts, 88.
111 Ibid., 89.
112 Sol LeWitt, public discussion with Gary Garrels and Andrea Miller-Keller, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, February 19, 2000.
113 The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). Lynch’s examples are Boston (nongrid) and Jersey City (grid).
114 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51.
115 Ibid., 51.
116 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
117 Jameson writes that colonialism would constitute a pivotal moment in that history, the moment when “the truth of [daily] experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people” (Postmodernism, 411).
118 “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 98.
119 Fredric Jameson, Late Modernism: Adorno, or The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 168.
120 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 269.
Chapter 3
1 “Specific Objects,” in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975),184. An earlier version of this chapter was written for Ann Goldstein’s A Minimal Future: Art as Object 1958–1968, exh. cat., Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Many thanks to Ann for the invitation and to Marianne Stockebrand and Stefan Boddeker for being such gracious and generous hosts at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa; Stefan’s knowledge and kind shepherding were especially appreciated. Mary Leclere, whose conversation and company in Marfa was very welcome, also offered helpful feedback on my thoughts about Judd.
2 IBYM, 16.
3 Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 122.
4 Potts, The Sculptural Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 305.
5 As Meyer recounts in Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001): “During the spring of 1963 there was no ‘minimalism’ that could be opposed to ‘pop.’ Pop itself was hardly an established venture as the heterogeneous Janis [Gallery] show and numerous debates around this work suggested. As Larry Poons later recalled, during the early sixties ‘there weren’t any distinctions made between the abstractions of, say, Stella and Lichtenstein and Warhol’s work… . For a moment everything existed on the same walls and it was fine’” (45).
6 A secondary goal is to render the overarching and sometimes misleading terms “Pop” and “minimalism” less familiar, enabling us to see differences within, as well as connections between, the two movements. The artists themselves had very different relations to the terms most often used to describe their work. Where Warhol more or less embraced “Pop,” Judd repeatedly rejected the term “minimalism” and his placement under its rubric. He felt himself to have more in common with artists such as Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, Yayoi Kusama, and Lee Bontecou than with other “minimalists” like Robert Morris.
7 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 363.
8 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 11.
9 Charles Baudelaire, “To the Reader,” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. Stanley Kunitz (New York: New Directions, 1955).
10 In addition to the books from the 1950s, see the cultural histories by Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), and Brick, Age of Contradiction.
11 The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963), 296.
12 C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 333.
13 For Mills, political life was perhaps the most serious casualty of the new mass media, insofar as political concerns are squeezed into “formulas which are repeated and repeated,” the main function of which is to “divert from the explicitly political” (ibid., 336).
14 Ibid., 329.
15 Lepenies, Melancholy and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. 50–62.
16 Kracauer, “Boredom,” in The Mass Ornament, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 332.
17 Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Pocket Books, 1968/1970), 83–86; passage reprinted in Cultural Resistance Reader, ed. Stephen Duncombe, 328–30 (New York: Verso, 2002).
18 “Recommendations for Physicians on the Psychoanalytic Method of Treatment (1912),” in Therapy and Technique, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 117–26 (quotes, 118, 124).
19 See Heidegger on boredom as a fundamental Stimmung in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, esp. 132–59. See also Giorgio Agamben’s comments on Heidegger on boredom in The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), esp. 63–70.
20 “On Being Bored,” in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 68–78, 76.
21 “The Storyteller,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 149.
22 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 164–65.
23 Ibid., 166.
24 Ibid., 153.
25 This implies a deep knowledge of and engagement with tra
dition, as exemplified in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Fried insists that the question of quality can only be decided in relation to the tradition in a specific medium. Part of the problem with minimalist “theatricality” was that it was between media or, as Judd put it in the opening sentence of “Specific Objects,” “neither painting nor sculpture.” See Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 164.
26 Ibid., 168.
27 The styles of Pollock and Rothko were themselves being appropriated as instantly readable signals of American high culture and sophistication in American cold war propaganda, advertising, and fashion shoots. See Lears, Fables of Abundance, esp. 366–67, and the now classic Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). That speed was an important feature of emergent consumer culture in the United States is also evidenced, for example, by the invention of “fast food,” which we might date to the opening of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s franchise in 1955.
28 For Hal Foster, for example, the “fundamental reorientation” inaugurated by minimalism is that “the viewer, refused the safe, sovereign space of formal art, is cast back on the here and now; and rather than scan the surface of a work for a topographical mapping of the properties of the medium, he or she is prompted to explore the perceptual consequences of a particular intervention in a given state.” “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 38.
29 “The experience of another time and society, which is tenuous since so little is known, can nevertheless, almost uniquely, be gained through art” (Judd, Complete Writings, 33).
30 “Jackson Pollock,” in Complete Writings, 195.
31 Meyer, Minimalism, 140.
32 Ralph Barton Perry, General Theory of Value: Its Meaning and Basic Principles Construed in Terms of Interest (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1926), 115.
33 In Sedgwick and Frank, Shame and Its Sisters, 77. Tomkins emphasizes that not only sustained cognitive activity requires a particular active and sustainable interest, but even basic drives such as hunger and sexual desire can be suppressed if there is insufficient interest to support them.
34 On the logic of interest and its status as an aesthetic category, see Sianne Ngai’s important chapter “Merely Interesting,” in Our Aesthetic Categories (published after I first composed this essay, but speaking directly to its concerns).
35 For a different reading of the place of polarity in Judd’s work, see Richard Schiff, “Donald Judd: Fast Thinking,” in Donald Judd: Late Work (New York: Pace Wildenstein, 2000), 4–23.
36 Judd, “Specific Objects,” 188.
37 Judd’s reading of Oldenburg’s large light switch is more specific about the “emotive form” at work: “The whole switch seems to be like breasts but doesn’t resemble them and isn’t descriptive, even abstractedly. There aren’t two breasts, just two nipples. The two switches don’t seem like two breasts. As nipples though, they are far too large for the chest… . The form is whole and simple and has no discrete parts. The two switches aren’t separate from the rectangle; the three physically separable parts don’t, visually, add up to the whole. They’re made as a whole. They’re the same material and it bulges and sags the same throughout.” “Claes Oldenburg,” in Judd, Complete Writings, 193.
38 “The sense of objects occurs with forms that are near some simple, basic, profound forms you feel. These disappear when you try to make them into imaginable visual or tactile forms. The reference to objects gives them a way to occur. The reference and the basic form as one thing is Oldenburg’s main idea” (ibid., 192).
39 Ibid., 191.
40 Eliot: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensual experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (“Hamlet,” in Selected Prose, 48).
41 Benjamin, “Central Park,” SW4, 163.
42 Aesthetic Theory, 60.
43 Judd notes: “I’m also interested in what might be called black areas, or just plain areas, and what is seen obliquely, like the stack with the Plexiglas top and bottom. When viewed frontally the sides are seen obliquely, so the color and the plane and the face are somewhat obscure compared to the front. It’s the other way around when seeing the side. In most of my pieces, there are no front or sides—it depends on the viewing position of the observer.” “Don Judd: An Interview with John Coplans,” in don judd, ed. John Coplans (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 36.
44 Like a film still, any photo of Judd’s work represents a single moment in a work whose value and ontology lies in its duration. This is not to say that Judd’s works do not make excellent, beautiful photographs—the plays of light and shadow, sharp edges, and bright hues invite the photographic eye. But, inasmuch as the point is to experience the visual complexity produced by movement around the work, a photograph substitutes a view that is fundamentally incompatible with that experience. Such a photographic image presents a view the human eye never really had.
45 Judd, “Specific Objects,” 182.
46 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 27.
47 Stein, in “A Transatlantic Interview 1946,” in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973), 18 (describing experiments that led to the writing of Tender Buttons); Judd, “Interview with John Coplans,” 21.
48 Judd, “Specific Objects,” 183.
49 “It’s not conceived part by part, it’s done in one shot. The progressions made it possible to use an asymmetrical arrangement, yet to have some sort of order not involved in composition” (“Interview with John Coplans,” 41).
50 Ibid., 32.
51 G. W. Leibniz, “Monadology,” in Leibniz: Philosophical Texts, trans. Richard Francks and R. S. Woolhouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 268.
52 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 71.
53 Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd (1965),” in Donald Judd: Early Fabricated Work (New York: Pace Wildenstein, 1998), 15. See also Rosalind Krauss’s “The Uncanny Materiality,” in the same volume.
54 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 73.
55 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 155.
56 The work is question is Judd’s “pink Plexiglas box.” Smithson, “The Crystal Land (1966),” in Donald Judd: Early Fabricated Works, 16.
57 Plexiglas is a brilliant choice here for many reasons, not least because it is one of the first plastics after Bakelite to receive wide industrial, military, and everyday uses. Plastic, of course, is one of the enduring symbols of the falseness of consumer culture, even becoming a synonym for fakeness itself.
58 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1981), 82–83.
59 “Materials vary greatly and are simply materials—formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, Plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material” (Judd, “Specific Objects,” 187).
60 Judd, Complete Writings, 9.
61 “Culture Industry,” 111.
62 Quoted in “Andy Warhol, MovieMan: ‘It’s Hard to Be Your Own Script,’” interview by Leticia Kent, Vogue, March 1, 1970; reprinted in IBYM, 187.
63 Unseen Warhol, ed. John O’Connor and Benjamin Liu (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), 40.
64 The full passage is one of Warhol’s best known: “I’ve been quoted a lot as saying ‘I like boring things.’ Well, I said it and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not bored by them. Of course, what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to wat
ch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite; if I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same—I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel” (POP, 50).
65 For an account of the making of the film, see Angell, Films of Andy Warhol Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994).
66 Joseph, “Play of Repetition,” 28.
67 Suárez, “Warhol’s 1960s Films,” 634.
68 Angell, Films Part II, 10. After Sleep, Warhol abandoned editing almost entirely for a few years, and he never again edited as much as he did in Sleep. Angell, Joseph, and Andrew Uroskie all note the similarities to John Cage’s 1963 performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations, which Warhol attended after he had shot but before he had edited the footage. This 18-hour, 40-minute concert comprises an 80-second piece of music being repeated 840 times by a changing roster of pianists. As Uroskie notes, “In both works, an extreme reduction of incident, repeated over an extended duration, resulted in a phenomenologically charged perceptual situation. Minor variations struck with novel resonance; in the absence of variation, the viewer was thrown back on herself, on her own act of spectatorship.” Uroskie, Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 46.
69 Tyler writes, in what remains one of the best essays on Warhol’s films: “Film-seeing implies the most passive psychological state of all the visual arts because the theater seat itself is habit forming, and because while watching plays, on the contrary, one shares a certain tension with the live performers.” “Dragtime and Drugtime, or, Film a la Warhol,” Evergreen Review 11, no. 46 (1967); reprinted in O’Pray, Film Factory, 97.