Beacon, New York
Minimal Art evolved into prominence in the early 1960s. At the outset, the major sculptors included Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Robert Morris. I recall the term “epistemological Minimalism” associated with these five, coming from a critical essay by Robert Pincus-Witten. LeWitt soon made it clear that he was a “conceptual artist,” as noted in his well-known series of propositions published in 1967. Similarly, Judd, who worked as a critic at the outset of his career, thought of his sculpture as “empiricist,” not minimal—a refinement on his important 1965 essay, “Specific Objects.” From the point of view of sculpture as a medium, however, some of the most accurate assessments of reductive form came through a series of essays by Robert Morris, the first of which, “Notes on Sculpture, Part I” (1966), gives priority to the presence of sculpture as something that occupies space from a temporal perspective…see the entire review in the print version of June’s Sculpture magazine.
