Beyond Geometry


		Beyond Geometry examines a group of related artistic developments involving the use of radically simplified form and systematic strategies, which emerged in Europe and the Americas between 1945 and 1979.


		Since the early twentieth century, artists, like scientists and philosophers, have explored notions of relativity, which propose a constantly changing world defined by dynamic forces and relationships.


		Following World War II, traditional composition seemed to many to be concerned more with style than with substance, a superficial way of making a work look good that had little to do with its meaning.


		Beginning in the mid-1960s, in an attempt to make their creative process accessible, certain artists made the intellectual aspects of artistic production and reception the subject of their work.


		In the late 1960s and the 1970s conceptualism was widely considered an endgame — the logical conclusion of the modernist tendency toward formal simplification — and painting was proclaimed "dead," the province of an earlier time and generation.



		Beyond Geometry examines a group of related artistic developments involving the use of radically simplified form and systematic strategies, which emerged in Europe and the Americas between 1945 and 1979. This period saw the advent of the Cold War and the war in Vietnam; the civil rights movement and the women's movement; and the questioning of family values, sexual orientation, and racial stereotyping. In the art world, dominance shifted from Europe to the United States. Coming after the height of modernism and before the first fully postmodern generation, the period includes what was arguably the most influential epoch for art since

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		the decade before World War I, spanning from 1960 to 1975. Beyond Geometry chronicles a growing global consciousness. In the mid-1940s most artistic trends were regional, but by the end of the 1960s inexpensive air travel, photocopying machines, and easy long-distance telecommunications had permitted a broad-based intercontinental art discourse, the foundation of today's international art world. Having lived under the cultural hegemony of Europe, many U.S. artists and their supporters viewed the post-World War II era as their moment and their art as entirely separate from developments elsewhere.

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		Beyond Geometry questions that hypothesis. An examination of artistic practices in Central and Western Europe and North and South America reveals obvious differences, but many of the same influences and desires were felt on all three continents. Prizing process over product, artists everywhere attempted to forge new, more interactive relationships with the viewer. They sought a dynamic art that engaged the spectator's entire body, not only the eyes. Widespread interest in phenomenology, a philosophy of perception, fueled this quest. Following the precepts of French artist Marcel Duchamp, artists during this period disdained the

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		purely visual in favor of art's intellectual content. They created temporary or huge and geographically inaccessible works that questioned the mechanisms by which art was revered and commodified, and created systems for art making—some mathematical and rational, others random and irrational—that theoretically reduced the authority and mystique of the creator, further undermining the values of the art market. These concerns and the art they produced express the shifting mores of a socially and politically turbulent period. Through their work, the artists represented in Beyond Geometry simultaneously reflected and helped shape those times.

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New and influential modes of abstraction emerged following World War II. During these years Swiss artist Max Bill came to embody the concrete art movement, which called for an abstract art whose pictorial elements, based in simple mathematics, were purely self-referential. Forms that alluded to natural phenomena or that served lyrical or symbolic ends were strictly forbidden. Bill's theoretical orthodoxy both inspired and repelled artists in Europe and North and South America. In the late

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		1950s the neoconcretists in Rio de Janeiro were among those who rejected his theories. Although they, like Bill, worked with highly simplified forms, they embraced expressiveness and subjectivity as well. Artists in Europe also broke with the rigidity of Bill's theories, forming groups such as Zero, Nul, Gruppo T, and GRAV. Most of them eliminated geometry as a basis for their work and, like the Brazilians, took a freer approach to art making. In the United States the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman, who made radically simplified paintings that rejected European artistic traditions, strongly influenced the generation of

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Most artists represented in Beyond Geometry sought a new, more active relationship with the spectator. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, described perception in a way that influenced and supported their ideas: for him it was immediate, fluid, and physical, involving the whole body, not just the eyes. To intensify the viewer's physical relationship to the work, some artists moved from painting, which had been preeminent in modernism, to objects, which were more like sculpture. Most

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		works included under this rubric are at least partially three-dimensional. A number sit directly on the floor without pedestals, sharing the everyday space of the beholder. Their physical presence can make viewers aware of their own scale in relationship to the work in question and their position in space. This kind of experiential interaction, which almost precedes conscious thought, was crucial for the artists represented here.

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Since the early twentieth century, artists, like scientists and philosophers, have explored notions of relativity, which propose a constantly changing world defined by dynamic forces and relationships. The system of one-point perspective, invented during the Renaissance, had presumed a static universe envisioned by a single, all-seeing eye. Viewing a painting composed using this system has been compared to looking through a window onto the world. The artists represented in this section, in

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		contrast, sought a more experiential approach that would actively engage viewers, sometimes even bringing them inside the "world" of the artwork. Movement was a way to achieve an art reflective of the viewer's shifting sensory and perceptual point of view. Motion could be actual (generated by motors or natural forces), virtual (using optical illusions), human (through performance), or created by the play of natural light over a monochrome white surface. The fleeting nature of all kinds of light paralleled the immediacy and transience of the viewing experience. Some artists created light environments that worked on all the

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Following World War II, traditional composition seemed to many to be concerned more with style than with substance, a superficial way of making a work look good that had little to do with its meaning. It was seen as an unacceptable, even bourgeois, compromise. The systematic repetition of shapes, words, numbers, or images, whether in a line or grid, was a means of avoiding that kind of subjective aesthetic decision making.
Repetition constituted the most basic of systems. With its associations

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		with industrial production and emphasis on process over product, it tacitly undermined the celebration by the art market of the uniqueness of the object and artistic touch (an artist's distinctive handling of materials and way of "drawing" in pencil, pen, paint, or even clay, which, together with other attributes, constitute an identifiable artistic "signature"). Some artists had fabricators produce their objects, further challenging the value placed on technical facility. These strategies also downplayed the mystique of the inventive genius, reflecting the social mores of a politically turbulent time.

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		Seriality, like repetition, was a simple system that artists employed to similar ends, using images, forms, numbers, or words in sequence within a single piece.

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Beginning in the mid-1960s, in an attempt to make their creative process accessible, certain artists made the intellectual aspects of artistic production and reception the subject of their work. The result was a diverse form called conceptual art, which strongly reflected the antimaterialist values of the Vietnam War era. Some made works consisting exclusively of words or drawings painted on a wall. Others followed predetermined, sometimes random schemes that denied the value of both

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		intuition and rationality. The undermining of the traditional art object that characterized conceptualism also promoted the mixing of genres: literature and visual art, theater and visual art, dance and visual art. In much of the work in this section, text is primary; this implicit critique of the object also permeated performance and installation art, artist's books, and earthworks. Marketing of "dematerialized" or monumental and geographically inaccessible pieces was difficult if not impossible.

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In the late 1960s and the 1970s conceptualism was widely considered an endgame—the logical conclusion of the modernist tendency toward formal simplification—and painting was proclaimed "dead," the province of an earlier time and generation. Both assumptions were unfounded. Artists never ceased painting, and conceptualism proved extremely generative, inflecting much of the art that followed. Even as conceptualism emerged, artists were using its strategies as a path back to painting.

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		Some created predetermined systems for the production of paintings; others deconstructed painting's physical components (such as the support, hanging devices, and paint quality, application, and color). Still others explored the issues of painting in forms such as installation art, photography, or artist's books, which were more closely aligned with the artistic vanguard of the times.

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		senses, enveloping visitors in a mesmerizing, seemingly transcendent atmosphere.



		minimalists that emerged in New York around 1960.