Alanna Spence
Minimalism Seminar
CCA 2007
Sol Le Witt Serial Project #1 p226-227
Mel Bochner Serial Attitude p 227-229
Buchloh Conceptual Art 1962-1969 (Aesthetics of Admin to critique of institutions *
Much of the reading this week discussed working in serial and setting up a systematic approach to art making. Working in serial is a method of art making and is almost more important than the art itself. The process of exploration that working in serial brings, reached a deeper exploration of the thing that working with just one piece of work. Sol LeWitt sets up a systemic method for creating his serial works. Each piece shares nearly all the identical components, but he systematically changes one part, or one aspect of each piece. Keeping most of the elements constant, accentuates the changes made. He worked with simplified forms, cubes and square. LeWitt stated that using more complex objects would be too interesting and would take focus away from the serial as a whole.
Bochner talked about how working in serial order is different than working in duplicate. Serial work is a documentation of a systematic process of discovery. The order or system employed in the serial work is more important than the execution or the form of the work. The completed serial work is self-exhausting in its exploration. I found all sorts of correlations in Bochner’s piece, especially the list of definitions on page 228 that could be mapped to software architecture. And I see this work as being a way of structuring the art by means of scientific organization and procedure. Something that’s often hard to correlate to art, but one that exists informally in most artist’s practices. It’s just that serial artists of this period decided to take this artist’s method to a new, more disciplined level.
Buchloh compares a couple of different directions that conceptual art took. He said in the early 19670s there was a conflict between structural specificity and Random Organization, between systematic reduction and empirical verification. He compared Reinhardt and Duchamp as being on either extreme. Reinhardt as the empiricist American formalist and Duchamp as the conceptualist “art as idea.” He also talked about conceptual practices as fitting into three different perceptual models. 1. Visuality 2. Commodity status and 3. Form of distribution. Much of the art of this time were challenging long practiced ideas about what form art took e.g. paint on canvas, what it looked like more or less, and how it was bought and sold. Conceptual art at times completely removed the artists hands, such as Duchamp’s readymades or Judd’s wall stacks. And Maybe artists were playing with new ideas for delivery. The book form became a popular medium for artists like Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham. Art became whatever artists decided it could be.