Physical Properties, Perception And Structure

In 1960s, the late modernist art and early postmodernist art overlapped in this period. The great fracture between these two different kinds of art seems to have become the invisible consensus under the construction of many art history books such as Art since 1900. In China, few domestic scholars tended to think about the relationship between modernism and post-modernism from the critical perspective of "mainstream abstractness of modern art". In fact, this relationship is by no means only in the form of the presence of fracture, but as a continuum with a strict and logical relationship. This judgement is made on the basis of what American critics in 1960s and 1970s had commented about the minimalism which belonged to the category of so-called late modernist art. Through reading and researching critical texts about minimalism, I try to establish the complex logical transiting relationship between modernism and postmodernism from the perspective of criticism.Firstly, criticism and interpretation about the meaning of minimalism was from the perspective of "objecthood" derived of something internal to modernism, which leaded to the fact that early minimalism was labeled the tag of objecthood. Critics such as Greenberg, Judd and Fried with different positions presented their differences in the treatment of this label, and this is what the first chapter is about. Why does minimalism need to highlight their physical properties, and what is their purpose and significance? Fried pointed out that the objecthood of minimalism was established in a perceptual situation of phenomenology. From then on, the phenomenological turn of minimalism criticism had began. Robert Morris and Michelson used Merleau-Ponty’s theory to explain a new theater situation constructed by minimalism, and this is the second chapter. At last, given that the research of Rosalind Krauss deepened the so-called proposition of outside theater proposed by Fried and Morris, chapter three will investigate the linear procession from her modernist criticism to minimalist criticism focusing on the phenomenological issue of the relationship between work and audience, and eventually advanced the criticism of minimalism to the stage of the postmodern structuralism in the late 1970s.From objecthood to perception and then to structure, what matters is not only the philosophical postmodern turn of the means of minimalism criticism, but also the fact that interpretation about the meaning of minimalism had overflow the scope of form, transiting from the internal crisis of modernism to the outside space of postmodernism. This turn is not only beneficial to our understanding of the property and meaning of minimalism in a comprehensive way, but provides a new prospect for scholars to re-examine the relationship between modernism and postmodernism.