Eccentric objects: rethinking sculpture in 1960s America

Abstract

Jo Applin, Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America New Haven and London, Yale Universit y Press, 2012, 176 pp., 40 colour and 38 b & w illustrations, £35. ISBN 978-0-300-18198-2When you next see a copy of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - the one with the sleeve by Peter Blake - look carefully at the figure partly obscured by the lime-green feathered plume in George Harrison's bicorne. That's H. C. Westermann, the American sculptor, and one of the five artists who form the focus of Jo Applin's Eccentric Objects. Applin takes some pleasure in the fact that one of her artists is in the crowd, rubbing shoulders with Mahatma Ghandi, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe and all those other famous faces that form the backdrop for the Fab Four. It proves he was part of the 1967 zeitgeist. But only partly, inasmuch as only his left eyebrow, forehead and hair are properly detectible. For Applin, his semi-visibility in this famous image is apt, for it provides her with a nice allegory for describing his equivalently 'oblique' standing within the contemporary art scene (p. 115).Applin's recourse to Blake's album sleeve also serves as helpful way of summarizing her art-historical approach to sculpture during 1960s. She selects sculptors - Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Westermann and Bruce Nauman - who were all well represented by museums and galleries during the period, yet arguably never quite seem central to histories of that moment. The reason for this is that their art now fails to fit with the critical categories that art historians are inclined to use when discussing this period, such as 'abstraction', 'assemblage', 'minimalism' or 'pop'. Nonetheless, she is clear that these artists do not amount to an alternative tradition: instead she is more interested in charting the ways in which their various trajectories intersect with the more established narratives that have come to define this era. Her rationale is that by approaching sculpture from the perspective of these figures, who otherwise might appear as 'misfits' (p. 141), the tidy, familiar histories of 1960s sculpture begin to unravel, and the entire field starts to look a lot more idiosyncratic, and generally more open.If Blake's Beatles album sleeve is one of the most iconic images from 1960s popular culture, then Donald Judd's essay 'Specific Objects' must surely hold a commensurate status for students of 1960s art. Judd's 1965 review of the work of his contemporaries is one of those essays that is included on reading lists for practically every post-war art history survey course for undergraduates.1 But students are largely encouraged to read it as a manifesto for the newly emerging minimalist tendencies, with which Judd's name would increasingly be associated. The problem, though, is that almost all the art he references in 'Specific Objects' hardly looks 'minimal' by today's standards; in fact it is often a challenge for students to come to terms with the disarming stylistic diversity of his examples. For Applin, however, the heterogeneity of Judd's choices is a source of great interest, and this serves as the starting point for her account. Eccentric Objects is essentially a study of those artists whom Judd enlisted in order to clarify his artistic programme, and by exploring this diverse body of material, she tacitly undermines the coherency of minimalism as a critical category.Judd, however, is not the only critical reference point to which Applin refers. She points out that sculptors such as Oldenburg, Bontecou and Nauman also enjoyed the endorsement of the critic Lucy Lippard, in spite of the fact that her outlook is often seen as extremely different to Judd's. In other words both writers were turning to the same artists to promote their respective positions. In 1966 Lippard curated the group exhibition 'Eccentric Abstraction', with a view to promoting a biomorphic alternative to the hard-edged forms of the increasingly dominant minimalist trend. …