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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In Rational Irrationalism, Al Loving layered open cubes and juxtaposed warm and cool colors to create an optical play of three-dimensionality on a flat support. The interlocking modules form a geometric shape that recurs in the form of the canvas itself. Loving’s paintings from the 1960s garnered significant attention, and in 1969 he became the first African American artist to receive a one-person show at the Whitney.

In the 1960s, Loving was one of several African American artists seen by some as being out of step with the Black Arts Movement, which asserted the urgent need for art particularly reflective of African Americans’ everyday struggles, usually through figurative work. Loving, however, believed that “art is about needs that have not been met”—whether political or aesthetic.

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America Is Hard to See

Rational Irrationalism

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ALVIN LOVING (1935-2005), RATIONAL IRRATIONALISM, 1969

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America Is Hard to See

Rational Irrationalism

18

ALVIN LOVING (1935-2005), RATIONAL IRRATIONALISM, 1969

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection