Artistic Agency and the ‘On and On’ of Repetition in Post-60s Art

Abstract

Briony Fer: The Infinite Line: Re-Making Art After Modernism (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2004), 90 b&w and colour illns, 224 pp., hardback ISBN 0 300 10401 4, £27. Pamela M. Lee: Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 67 b&w illns, 336 pp., hardback ISBN 0 262 12260 X, £22.95. There is a growing literature on the art of the 1960s that is, finally, reflecting inquiries beyond the major landmarks of minimal and conceptual art. Recent books include Alex Potts' The Sculptural Imagination1 and Anne Rorimer's New Art in the 60s and 70s.2 In these two most recent additions, Pamela M. Lee and Briony Fer traverse some well-known episodes from that time. Neither is a radical re-reading of the decade. Instead, both try to open up the art and critical writings that made an impact then. Both writers want to present the decade as a time when a wide range of social, political, and technological changes came to have a profound impact on the way artists made their work. Indeed, both make change itself problematic: if the 1960s indicate to most a series of revolutions which we are still working out, both authors proceed as if the response to this situation should neither be obvious or predictable. These books are good companions. They deal with very similar issues: artists trying to bring their practice into larger contexts, expanding notions of medium, and, perhaps cannily, ‘time’ (or ‘repetition’, but more on this later). They represent, however, flip sides of the same coin. Fer considers a number of artists who sit problematically on the edge of the avant-garde (among others, Ellsworth Kelly, Eva Hesse and Michelangelo Pistoletto) and uses them to elaborate what she calls ‘the exhaustion of the modernist aesthetic’. Lee addresses more broadly the impact of new technology on the way society is organised, and reinterprets artists whose work can be seen as elaborating a critical response to it. Whilst the bigger questions about the decade are not in play – the advent of postmodernism is a given for both authors – both books contain compelling discussions of how the 1960s played a key role in getting us to where we are now.