America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Rational Irrationalism

Rational Irrationalism

Floor 6

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.

Donald Judd rejected the illusionism of traditional painting in favor of sculpture, explaining that “actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.” As in the case of the ten-part Untitled, he often created works from multiple components, staggering the intervals between the geometric units with precisely measured spacing in order to emphasize what he called “the thing as a whole.” By situating his sculptures directly on the ground, as with Untitled, he was able to fully engage the space—and the people—around them.

In Eva Hesse’s untitled sculpture, mutability itself operates as a sculptural medium. To create this suspended work, one of the last she made before her death at the age of thirty-four, Hesse had knotted ropes dipped into buckets of latex. When these were hung up to dry, the viscous liquid either adhered to the twisted ropes’ surface or dripped off, resulting in sections of tangled gnarls and sweeping loops that retain the incongruities of their making. Hesse signaled her interest in such unpredictability in her notes for a preparatory drawing, describing “hung irregularly tying knots as connections really letting it go as it will. Allowing it to determine more of the way it completes its self.” Consequently, this sculpture is configured somewhat differently every time it is put on display.

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.

Brice Marden’s Summer Table is divided into three equally sized but differently colored panels, all free of explicit representational reference and obvious brushstrokes. Marden used a spatula to smooth out the paint, creating a matte but lustrous surface. However, he also left a strip of canvas at the bottom with drips and splashes of paint, thus displaying the process that is camouflaged in the rest of the work. The evidence of process relates Marden’s work to the gesture-filled Abstract Expressionist canvases of the 1950s. Summer Table, moreover, is not a “pure” abstraction. Like the work of Ellsworth Kelly, it is based on an observation—in this case, Marden’s recollection of a table he saw on the Greek island of Hydra, set out with glasses of lemonade and Coca-Cola, as well as the colors of the surrounding garden and sea. As the work progressed, the formal aspects of the panels took over, creating stronger colors with a visually tense interplay between the bright central panel and its flanks.

An installation of 3 large L-shaped blocks in a gallery.

Robert Morris’s deceptively simple sculpture Untitled (3 Ls) presents us with a subtle perceptual puzzle. Although its three elements are identical in shape, they appear different from one another based on their varying orientations. This allows us to view the same form simultaneously from multiple perspectives, so that the act of seeing becomes an implicit subject of Morris’s work. This effect is heightened as we move around the sculpture, becoming aware of how our response to it is affected by our bodily position. Morris was one of the founding figures of Minimalism in the 1960s, a movement that became known for its stark forms and industrial materials, as well as its rejection of traditional artistic techniques such as modeling and casting. The repeated elements of Morris’s sculpture invoke the processes of commercial manufacture, like so many products from an assembly line. Yet the artist has indicated that the three units may be configured differently for each space in which they are presented, thereby introducing an element of play that counteracts the work’s otherwise inert and imposing forms.

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

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.

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Anne Truitt, Triad, 1977

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Narrator: Anne Truitt called this 1977 sculpture Triad, meaning "a group of three." Art historian James Meyer was friends with the artist.

James Meyer: If you look at the work, it consists of two different but similarly valued planes of a kind of pale, sort of lavender. And at the corners is a sort of band of peach. And at the bottom you see a very slender red stripe. ...So you have three visual terms on the surface of the piece. Triad has references of a kind of tense balance. It's not two terms, but three. So it's almost as if that red little stripe at the bottom is holding the whole thing together in a kind of intensity. It's almost like a package being held together by a little string that could suddenly get pulled apart.

Narrator: Truitt belonged to the same generation as the Minimalist sculptors. She shared their interest in precise, geometrical forms—like the column. But the Minimalists wanted the viewer to respond to the object only as a physical fact. By contrast, Truitt found expressive qualities even in something as simple as the elongated proportions of this column.

James Meyer: That height and that slimness, which is something Truitt becomes very keen on in her later work, renders it less and less an object, and more and more something elusive, something pointing to a subject matter beyond its own physical materiality.

Triad is an important example of Anne Truitt’s best-known sculptural form, the column, which she consistently explored for nearly four decades beginning in the early 1960s. While the human-size geometric shape made for a ready comparison with the work of contemporaneous Minimalist artists, Truitt favored allusive, evocative titles and did not use the methods of industrial fabrication preferred by practitioners such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris. Triad is wood coated with multiple layers of a warm beige acrylic paint that seems to pulsate with undertones of pale pink. “What I want is color in three dimensions,” the artist explained in 1979, “color set free, to a point where, theoretically, the support should dissolve into pure color.” A thin band of red, inset near the base of the plinth, enables an optical trick that makes Triad appear as if it is rising from the floor, overcoming volume and ascending into the realm of “pure color” that Truitt sought to achieve.

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View 646 works

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Rational Irrationalism

WALTER GUTMAN (1903-1986), TRISHA BROWN CO. AT THE WHITNEY MUSEUM 1971—THE REHEARSAL, 1971

DONALD JUDD (1928-1994), UNTITLED, 1966

EVA HESSE (1936-1970), NO TITLE, 1969-70

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

BRICE MARDEN (B. 1938), SUMMER TABLE, 1972-73

ROBERT MORRIS (B. 1931), UNTITLED (3 LS), 1965, REFABRICATED 1970

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

KEITH SONNIER (B. 1941), BA-O-BA, NUMBER 3, 1969

ANNE TRUITT (1921-2004), TRIAD, 1977

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Rational Irrationalism

WALTER GUTMAN (1903-1986), TRISHA BROWN CO. AT THE WHITNEY MUSEUM 1971—THE REHEARSAL, 1971

DONALD JUDD (1928-1994), UNTITLED, 1966

EVA HESSE (1936-1970), NO TITLE, 1969-70

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

BRICE MARDEN (B. 1938), SUMMER TABLE, 1972-73

ROBERT MORRIS (B. 1931), UNTITLED (3 LS), 1965, REFABRICATED 1970

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

KEITH SONNIER (B. 1941), BA-O-BA, NUMBER 3, 1969

ANNE TRUITT (1921-2004), TRIAD, 1977

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection