Log24

From “Secondary Structures,” by Tom Moody, Sculpture Magazine, June 2000:

“By the early ’90s, the perception of Minimalism as a ‘pure’ art untouched by history lay in tatters. The coup de grâce against the movement came not from an artwork, however, but from a text. Shortly after the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from New York City’s Federal Plaza, Harvard art historian Anna Chave published ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’ (Arts Magazine, January 1990), a rousing attack on the boys’ club that stops just short of a full-blown ad hominem rant. Analyzing artworks (Walter de Maria’s aluminum swastika, Morris’s ‘carceral images,’ Flavin’s phallic ‘hot rods’), critical vocabulary (Morris’s use of ‘intimacy’ as a negative, Judd’s incantatory use of the word ‘powerful’), even titles (Frank Stella’s National Socialist-tinged Arbeit Macht Frei and Reichstag), Chave highlights the disturbing undercurrents of hypermasculinity and social control beneath Minimalism’s bland exterior.  Seeing it through the eyes of the ordinary viewer, she concludes that ‘what [most] disturbs [the public at large] about Minimalist art may be what disturbs them about their own lives and times, as the face it projects is society’s blankest, steeliest face; the impersonal face of technology, industry and commerce; the unyielding face of the father: a face that is usually far more attractively masked.'”