“Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture,” the artist Donald Judd declared in 1964, in his essay “Specific Objects.” The “best new work” was made using industrial materials—steel, vinyl, and aluminum panels, for example—or easily available canvases, and often with an economy of means. “The things I make,” wrote artist Charlotte Posenenske in 1968, “are variable, as simple as possible, reproducible.”
In the mid-1960s, Judd, Posenenske, and the other artists represented in this gallery—many of whom were associated with the Minimalism and Pop art movements—also deployed a variety of methods in their art making, whether providing instructions to technicians, relying on ready-made objects or circumstances, or acting out basic gestures for a camera. Industrial technologies, mathematical systems, rational processes, and serial repetition facilitated new ways of working. “Simply order, like that of continuity,” wrote Judd, “one thing after another.”
Organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, with Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints & Curatorial Affairs.
