A Minimal Future? Art As Object 1958-1968

by Ann Goldstein, Diedrich Diederichsen (Sous la direction de)

As a new movement that arose in the 1950s and 1960s, Minimalism challenged traditional ideas about art-making and the art object. A Minimal Future? Art As Object 1958-1968, which accompanies a major exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, offers a redefinition of Minimalism by situating it in the context of the concurrent aesthetics of modernist abstraction, pop art, and nascent ideas of conceptual art. Minimalism is presented as a range of strategies that propelled new definitions of the structure, form, material, image, and production of the art object and renegotiated its relationship to space and to the spectator.

Focusing on the years 1958-1968, A Minimal Future? presents key works within the framework of a scholarly re-examination of minimal art's emergence and historical context. It reflects the early transitional period that begins in the late 1950s, through the so-called "canonization" of Minimalism by 1968, with an emphasis on work produced in the mid-to-late 1960s.

The book includes works from the late 1950s through the late 1960s by 40 artists, including Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Jo Baer, Larry Bell, Mel Bochner, Judy Chicago, Dan Flavin, Robert Grosvenor, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, John McCracken, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Anne Truitt, and Lawrence Weiner that reflect the shifting object status of painting and sculpture.

The text features original essays by prominent art historians and scholars. Diedrich Diedrichsen addresses the relationship between minimal art and music; Jonathan Flatley focuses on Donald Judd and Andy Warhol; Timothy Martin considers performance in relation tominimal art; James Meyer examines East and West Coast practices of Minimalism; and Anne Rorimer discusses the relationship of minimal to conceptual art. Exhibition curator Ann Goldstein contributes an introduction. Also included are individual entries on each of the artists, an extensive bibliography, and an exhibition chronology. The 400-page book includes 300 images, most in color.

Genres: Art

452 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Ann Goldstein has been working as a translator from Italian for over fifteen years. Her first published translation appeared in The New Yorker in 1992: Aldo Buzzi's essay "Checkov in Sondrio." Just one year later, her translation of Aldo Buzzi's 1994 collection Journey to the Land of Flies and Other Travels received the PEN Renato Poggioli Prize. She has also translated works by Roberto Calasso, Serena Vitale, Alessandro Baricco, and Pope John Paul II. In 2007 alone, she translated Alessandro Piperno's The Worst Intentions (Europa Ed.), and Antonio Monda's Do You Believe? (Vintage); and she edited and wrote an introduction for A Tranquil Star (Norton), a collection of seventeen stories by Primo Levi--nine of which she translated--that had never appeared in English before. During her Guggenheim term, she will be working on a translation of the complete works of Primo Levi.

Ms. Goldstein earned a B.A. in literature from Bennington College in 1971, and then studied comparative philology at University College, London, before joining the staff of The New Yorker as a proofreader and copyeditor in 1974. She was promoted to editor and head of the copy department in 1987, positions she has held ever since. In that capacity, she has worked with John Updike, Roger Angell, Janet Malcolm, Adam Gopnik, and Simon Schama, among other noted writers. In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship, she has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy twice (1995, 2006) and a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome twice (1993-94, 2002).