James Sampson Meyer Bücher

Artists, architects, art historians, critics, and curators explore the work of Donald Judd as both artist and critic in essays spanning all of Judd's career.Donald Judd (1928-1994) is one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed new ideas about art--in both his works and writings--that challenged many of modernism's core tenets by resisting the categories of painting and sculpture. Judd described this work as specific objects. Critics labeled it minimalism. Perhaps because Judd's own critical writings provide a discursive framework for his work, some of the monographic essays on his work are not widely known. This volume collects critical and scholarly writings on Judd, examining his work as both artist and critic.

Minimalism offers the first straightforward and useful summary of the output and outlook of the artists associated with minimalism in its heyday, as well as its subsequent development into more nuanced visual forms and its relationship to postmodernism. Editor James Meyer is a specialist who has written extensively on Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt, four of the seminal minimalists (the fifth is Robert Morris). Despite the intellectual thorniness of this art, Meyer avoids the turgidity that marks much of the writing associated with it. Tracing the origins of minimalism primarily to Frank Stella's "Black Paintings" of 1959, Meyer outlines the shifting, often warring definitions of this new kind of art. Once sculptors Andre and Judd had made their mark, there was doubt that painters could be minimalists. Brice Marden and Robert Ryman made the cut because their work was believed to be purely about the process of painting. Interestingly, although this was overwhelmingly a male club, curators also initially embraced the work of several women artists (including Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt) who retained such minimalist no-noes as irregular, handmade marks, color that could be perceived independently of form, and a belief in transcendent meaning.

Exploring the concept of the "double," this book delves into its significance in modern and contemporary art. It analyzes how artists utilize this motif to reflect themes of identity, duality, and perception, offering insights into the psychological and cultural implications of the double. Through various artworks and critical perspectives, the text reveals the complexities of representation and the ways in which the double challenges traditional notions of self and reality in artistic expression.