Encountering Modernism:
Modern Art and Theory since 1945

Overview

‘This option will examine developments in modernist painting and sculpture from c.1945 to the present, primarily in relation to American but also European art. We will explore these developments against the critical interests of modernist theory. We will address the issue of opticality, the emergence of the minimalist object, and the shift towards process-based practice and the so-called 'dematerialization' of the object. We will also look at alternatives to modernist art theory in order to examine the dismantling and subsequent disintegration of a modernist aesthetics which occurred by the late sixties. In particular, we will track the ways in which these changes can be read against parallel shifts to the spectator's encounter throughout the period, as both subject and object increasingly came under pressure, from the transcendent model of spectatorship seemingly offered by modernist abstract painting to the potentially disruptive and fragmentary effects of later installation and participatory works.

Specific artists to be studied may include Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Sol le Witt, Lee Bontecou, Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.

Aims

By the end of the module students should have acquired the following:

• knowledge of some of the main theoretical and historical approaches to the period
• a critical understanding of the concept of the canon in modernism and the critical problems associated with the modernist paradigm
• familiarity with a range of art works and the ways in which the meanings of such works have been contested within the modern period

Preliminary Reading

• Buchloh, Benjamin Neo-avant-garde and Culture Industry, MIT Press, 2000
• Fer, Briony The Infinite Line: remaking art after modernism, Yale UP, 2004
• Meyer, James, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, Yale UP, 2001
• Potts, Alex The Sculptural Imagination, Yale UP, 2000