Research Seminar: Women's Time: Martin and Truitt in the Moment of Minimalism

Professor Anne Wagner, Visiting Professor at the University of York, will present the department research seminar:  Women's Time: Martin and Truitt in the Moment of Minimalism.

For us moderns, time has changed. No longer does it feel like a river, or a piece of music setting the tempo of our dance. Instead it has become a quantity, an investment, which we save, borrow, waste and spend. Often we run out of it, though occasionally we have a little to spare. Only then, like our machines, do we switch "off." 

It was the forms of Minimalism that in the 1960s were most successful, and most influential, in reducing art's temporal demands to, well, a minimum, for both viewer and maker alike.  Repetition and geometry were the movement's primary means, as by now is well known.  But what is much less obvious is how and why some users of these straightforward '60s devices aimed for-and achieved-such utterly different perceptual effects. Anne Truitt, for example, speaks of her sculpture's ability to "disarm time." And in Agnes Martin's paintings, each line marks the duration of its making in and as its trace.

In "Women's Time," Anne Wagner will consider the implications of the work of these two artists, not least in terms of the challenges they level at Minimalism and the modern repackaging of time.