BARBARA ROSE
19
municated, pop and minimal artists shared a fundamentally Dada
critical attitude antagonistic to the achievements of high art. Their
downgrading of talent was essential to this leveling. For all its ex–
alted philosophical and psychological rhetoric, minimal art requires
only ideas, not talent, since it is clearly commercially fabricated. In–
deed "not made by human hands" could stand as the motto ofAmeri–
can art in the sixties . Automatic techniques in painting paralleled
the use of industrial modules in minimal art. The lack of surface tex–
ture and the rejection of both tactility and modeling in the name of a
spurious "opticality" became a trademark of color-field painting as
well as of pop and minimal art.
Unwittingly, I initiated the vogue for minimal art in the article
"ABC Art" written for
Art in America.
This shocked me since both the
concept and title of the article had been ideas of Jean Lipman, then
editor of
Art in America.
When the term "minimal art" became
synonymous with a kind of pared-down literalist abstraction based
on
gestalt
principles of perception, no one was as appalled or sur–
prised as I at the sudden popularity of the new "movement."
It was Donald Judd who made the definitive assault on Euro–
pean aesthetics in his much-quoted 1965 article "Specific Objects."
He called for an art that would reify the illusionistic qualities of
painting into their literal, material equivalents. This, he claimed,
would get rid of unreal illusionism, the last miserable vestige of
European art. I had met Judd in a graduate seminar on Venetian
Renaissance painting at Columbia and was impressed by his in–
telligence. The ghost of John Dewey was still hovering around Co–
lumbia, and Judd was profoundly influenced by Pragmatist theory,
as was
I.
For if there is any method in my criticism, it is the prag–
matic assumption that function determines meaning. Before trying
to evaluate a work of new art in terms of
a priori
categories, I asked
myself how the artist intended it to function. Was the work trying to
instruct, disorient, mock, stupefy or shock the audience, and if so,
why?
Like Robert Morris, Judd was a mid-Westerner, born in
Missouri. Both pursued graduate studies in New York, not in studio
art, but in art history. By the same token, Oldenburg, the son of a
Swedish diplomat, was a Yale graduate, and Stella a Princeton
alumnus. Well-equipped for polemics, they shared a sense of irony
that was probably the appropriate response to the American scene in
the sixties.
Both Greenberg andJudd were authoritarian personalities who
