1968: Art of The Real show at MOMA
Wall label from the exhibition:
A new kind of art has been developing in the U.S.A. over the last two decades. It has characteristics that are typically American. Though abstract, it is related, in attitude, to the great tradition of objective realism that dominated our art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This "art of the real," however, does not strive to be realistic-i.e. like the real-but to be as real in itself as the things we experience every day: the things we see, feel, knock against, and apprehend in normal physical ways.
This art seems to be an attempt to break with the main European tradition, in which content is considered to be dependent upon the successful balancing of different or unequal parts within the work. Even the most contemporary abstract European art deals with subtleties and complexities of composition, which by extension constitute editorial statements about the world quite outside of art. Such art tends to generalize about universal dynamics on an idealistic level. However, the works in this· exhibition, and particularly the most recent ones, avoid compositional incident, and reduce structure to the simplest orders: symmetry, frontality, and systems such as the grid, the module, the parallel, etc. Thus we are drawn into a direct confrontation with the work rather than to an interpretation of it; its realness as an object is intensified.
This distillation of formal and compositional means has been variously called "minimal art," "ABC art," or "literalist art." Its simplicity is deceiving. It has been creating a new vocabulary of forms and has revived our sense of the realness of vision and the pleasure of sensory experience. [more...]
A new kind of art has been developing in the U.S.A. over the last two decades. It has characteristics that are typically American. Though abstract, it is related, in attitude, to the great tradition of objective realism that dominated our art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This "art of the real," however, does not strive to be realistic-i.e. like the real-but to be as real in itself as the things we experience every day: the things we see, feel, knock against, and apprehend in normal physical ways.
This art seems to be an attempt to break with the main European tradition, in which content is considered to be dependent upon the successful balancing of different or unequal parts within the work. Even the most contemporary abstract European art deals with subtleties and complexities of composition, which by extension constitute editorial statements about the world quite outside of art. Such art tends to generalize about universal dynamics on an idealistic level. However, the works in this· exhibition, and particularly the most recent ones, avoid compositional incident, and reduce structure to the simplest orders: symmetry, frontality, and systems such as the grid, the module, the parallel, etc. Thus we are drawn into a direct confrontation with the work rather than to an interpretation of it; its realness as an object is intensified.
This distillation of formal and compositional means has been variously called "minimal art," "ABC art," or "literalist art." Its simplicity is deceiving. It has been creating a new vocabulary of forms and has revived our sense of the realness of vision and the pleasure of sensory experience. [more...]
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