New Directions.

I'm tempted to take my dissertation away from minimalism, and toward phallocentrism.

I'm reading through James Meyer's wonderful book, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, and I've got to the section on Stella, Judd and Flavin's interview with Glaser. The former two, who do most of the talking in the interview, are comparing themselves to earlier European geometric painters, such as Mondrian, in order to establish for themselves a new position with regard to wholeness. Stella, apparently borrowing from Barnet Newman, says that Mondrian is all about compositional ballance, while his work (both Stella and Newman, and Noland apparently) makes use of symmetry, not to attain ballance (?) but to effect wholeness without recourse to composition. (Composition seems to be a really big deal for these artists, as if the problem for art in the sixties was How do I remove my own taint from this piece?) At no point is anyone, including Meyer, concerned with the possibility of creating art that isn't whole.

Broadening this up to phallocentrism rather than minimalism studies explodes everything. Cage is the first obvious direction, since his pieces seem only whole due to critical intervention. then of course Pollack and Duchamp... but then it goes all over the place. Laurie Anderson says in an interview that her pieces don't necessarily exist in a final version. La Monte Young has several pieces that are still going on right now. Debussy? One wonders what the rhetoric surrounding chant was like. Lutoslawski's concern with closed form, his characterization of integral serialism as open form... But the need in the latter for constant coherence and perfect logic...

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