America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Rational Irrationalism

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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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RICHARD SERRA (B. 1939), PROP, 1968, REFABRICATED 2007

A sculpture of a steel pole leaning against a square of steel on a wall.
A sculpture of a steel pole leaning against a square of steel on a wall.

Richard Serra, Prop, 1968, refabricated 2007. Lead antimony and steel, 89 1/2 × 60 × 54 in. (227.3 × 152.4 × 137.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc. 69.20a b © 2015 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society ( ARS), New York

In the 1960s, Richard Serra used industrial materials to explore the physical conditions of making and viewing sculpture. In 1967, he began composing a list of verbs: “to roll, to crease, to fold, to bend.” He then subjected various pliable materials such as lead, latex, and vulcanized rubber to these verbal actions, examining the results to see which turned out to be a viable work of art. He was particularly interested in the behavior and logic of his material—most often lead—and described his working method as “figuring out what lead does.” For Prop, Serra rolled an 8 × 8 foot sheet of lead into a pole form, which he then used to prop a 5 × 5-foot square lead sheet against the wall. The work relies on the perpendicular supports of the floor and wall for its construction, creating a tenuous balance of thrust and counterthrust. This sustained tension and possibility of collapse imposes on viewers a heightened awareness of their physical environment and personal vulnerability.

Artists

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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