Dora Budor, Temps Mort, 2018. Rigid foam, acrylic polymer with pigment suspension, wood, hardware, foam coat, glaze, 12 x 7 x 5 ft., courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York, photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich.
This ’90s Exhibition About Feminism and Abstraction Started It All
GARAGE takes a closer look at More Than Minimal, an unsung exhibition of female and post-minimalist artists from over two decades ago, and finds that it paved the way for artists today.
Dora Budor, Temps Mort, 2018. Rigid foam, acrylic polymer with pigment suspension, wood, hardware, foam coat, glaze, 12 x 7 x 5 ft., courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York, photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich.
In the introduction to her 1996 exhibition More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the ’70s, at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, curator Susan L. Stoops noted that minimalism and feminism in art must be considered “as historical experiences rather than stylistic categories.” I would add that so, too, should abstraction—it is a history that has expanded into the imperatives of daily life, as much as it is a regimen for images made by artists. Or, it is as Eva Hesse said of her own work in a last interview before she died in 1970, paraphrasing legendary curator and New Museum founder Marcia Tucker: “Chaos structured as non-chaos.”
We should know by now that purity—often ascribed to the art of male contemporaries of Hesse, Lynda Benglis, Jackie Winsor, and Ree Morton, to name a few from Stoops’ show featured in this portfolio—is just a projection of value, or a speculation on it. The impurity of post-minimalism, its step towards extra, gets reincarnated into a contemporary art that roots around the job sites of industrial overproduction and goes home to get soaked in commercial aesthetics after reading up on its art history. Artists such as Amy Yao, Dora Budor, Kelly Akashi, Andrea Crespo, and Jennie C. Jones are each paired here with an artist from More Than Minimal to daydream a through line that may indeed hold.
Landscapes morph into video and subjects become objects that must circulate. The exterior world goes inside for a break and gets cooped up in a sea of information, basking in the glow of transmission. Boundaries have been well blurred, references disordered, and the candle is melting onto the brick now. Pluralism gets hyperactive while images become manifold, multiple, like a fun-house distortion; but while the mutation is real, the fun is debatable. The sky is above and also below. Drugs get redundant. Location is just a pin that can be dropped anywhere now, and even as emotions become scalable and reproducible, that still doesn’t mean they’re fake.
On her 2015 album Honeymoon, Lana Del Rey quoted T. S. Eliot: “What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility, only in a world of speculation.” But the 1930s were a long time ago, Eliot, and abstraction is not only what might have been, it is also the defining quality of now and what is likely to be. In precarity, we can only gesture and speculate. The present is not a kosher climate, and it may be all too much, but it’s thoroughly possible.
Left: Laida Lertxundi, 025 Sunset Red, 2016. 16mm, color, sound, 14 minutes, courtesy of the artist. Right: Michelle Stuart, Rio Grande Strata, 1974-1975. Earth from Rio Grande Basin, New Mexico, muslin-mounted rag paper, 7 3⁄4 x 10 x 1⁄2 in., courtesy of the artist.
Left: Samara Golden, The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes (installation view), 2017. 14 x 33 1/12 ft., 2017 Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, photo by and courtesy of the artist. Right: Jackie Ferrara, Stone Court (installation view), 1988. Limestone, 8 x 65 x 24 ft., General Mills Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis, Minnesota, courtesy of the artist.
A version of this story appears in GARAGE Issue 15, publishing September 2018. Reproduction, including downloading of works, is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
