In assigning to this work and to the rest of the Prop Pieces the problematic of the double-perspective, I am obviously not speaking of any specific text for which the works serve as some kind of sign. Rather I hope to locate a certain ground from which to grasp the meaning of Serra’s need to achieve verticality without permanently adhering separate parts of the sculpture. And this meaning, reaching beyond the domain of the purely formal, connects to the sensibility I have been trying to define within this essay—a sensibility which bridges the boundaries of historical labels.

In the past several years Serra’s works have tended to adopt a special form of drawing to define the modality of one’s experience of them. In this using of material ever more in terms of line, linear vectors, and types of boundaries, Serra shares in the way that recent abstract art in general has posited the importance of line, or of drawing per se. This was true of Robert Smithson’s and Michael Heizer’s art which related to landscape as a linear unfolding, and in a different way it is clearly true of Bochner and Rockburne.

One explanation for the interest in line—which is at this point quite widespread—might be the inherent closeness between line and language: the formulation of signs both simple and complex, and the assignment of meaning. And line fully externalized is part of a larger strategy. As I have argued, it functions within that metaphorical expression of the Self that has been a concern of a completely post-Expressionist art.

*

Godard once said that he thought most films turned out to be a form of remembering, that almost all of them seemed peculiarly to inhabit the past tense. He did not, he said, want that for his own work. For that reason, he explained, he did not prewrite his films. He would wait until the night before shooting a given scene to block it out, and during the shooting itself he would force the actors to improvise their lines. He courted the disarray, the mistakes even, of a lived present. In describing this, he was outlining a sensibility to which history, in the form of a narrative past seemed simply not to apply.

This essay began with another example of history rejected—that of Manet. I realize now that it was a bad example. For his was a procedure that was intensely historical; it was a disavowal of the content of a particular history, but not of history’s form. Because in order to criticize or outmode or even outdistance the past, Manet had to incorporate it within a given work. The Old-Master prototype had to serve as a ground against which the forms of the present could stand in relief. Couched within that juxtaposition was history itself, like an outworn garment used to line the fold of a new cloak. The meaning of the present was articulated against the residue of the past.

If I have tried to account for anything in this essay, it is something about why that very procedure has become unacceptable to certain artists of the past ten years. Some of these artists I have named; there are, of course, many others. For all of them there is no longer any question of proceeding by holding out an alternative to a past position. For to make art out of a reply to a formulation from the historical past is to immure oneself within the solipsistic space of memory itself. So they are not, for example, offering a new account of intention, because to do so would leave them trapped within the privacy of a mental space which the old one entailed. The space in which they exist, and for which they must vouch, is precisely one in which meaning is present as it maps itself onto reality, and in which the art they create must do the same.

Endnotes

(1) The composition of this group fluctuates in the various accounts of the period. Among the names generally included are Eve Hesse, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Bruce Nauman, Dorothea Rockburne, and Mel Bochner. For some writers, Sol LeWitt belongs properly to post-Minimalism, even though the generation through which his art emerged was that of Minimalism.

(2) I hope it is clear that my intention is not to draw up specific lines of influence, but rather to circumscribe a sensibility and a determination that seems to characterize certain art of the last ten years.

(3) See Michael Fried, Three American Painters, Cambridge, The Fogg Museum, 1965; and Fried’s subsequent essays on Stella.

(4) If we consider that Stella’s painting was involved, early on, in the work of Johns, then Johns’ interpretation of Duchamp and the Readymade––an interpretation diametrically opposed to that o the Conceptualist group outlined above––has some relevance to this connection. For Johns’ reading clearly saw the Readymade as pointing to the fact that there need be no connection between the final art object and the psychological matrix from which it issued, since in the case of the Readymade this possibility is precluded from the start. The Fountain was not made (fabricated) by Duchamp, only selected by him. Therefore, there is no way in which the urinal can ‘express’ the artist. It is like a sentence which is put into the world unsanctioned by the voice of a speaker standing behind it. Because maker and artist are evidently separate, there is no way for the urinal to serve as the externalization of the state or states of mind of the artist as he made it. And by not functioning within the grammar of the esthetic personality, the Fountain can be seen as putting distance between itself and the notion of personality per se. The relationship between Johns’ American Flag and his reading of the Fountain is just this: the arthood of the Fountain is not legitimized by its having issued stroke by stroke from the private psyche of the artist; indeed it could not. So it is like a man absentmindedly humming and being dumbfounded if asked if he had meant that tune rather than another. This is a case in which it is not clear how the grammar of intention might apply.

(5) In an important recent article, Kenneth Baker discusses sculptural space––mainly that of Caro––in relation to issues defined by Wittgenstein. See Arts, September, 1973.

(6) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, London, 1962, p. xii.

(7) “At the very moment,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “when I experience my existence. . . I fall short of the ultimate density which would place me outside time, and I discover within myself a kind of internal weakness standing in the way of my being totally individualized: a weakness which exposes me to the gaze of others as a man among men” (Ibid.).

(8) Marcia, Tucker, Robert Morris, New York, The Whitney Museum, 1970, p.25.

(9) Describing the meaning of depth, Merleau-Ponty writes, “when I look at a road which sweeps before me toward the horizon, I must not say either that the sides of the road are given to me as convergent or that they are given to me as parallel: they are parallel in depth. The perspective appearance is not posited, but neither is parallelism. I am engrossed in the road itself, and I cling to it through its virtual distortion, and depth is this intention itself which posits neither the perspective projection of the road, nor the ‘real’ road” (The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 261).

(10) When these pieces were first exhibited in 1967, they were rearranged every day by the artist into different configurations.