Jo Baer, Modernism, and Painting on the Edge

Abstract

Jo Baer's white canvases and abstract paintings of the late 1960s had a promising beginning. Included in important group shows in New York which helped define Minimal and early Conceptual art, her work was ostensibly well situated to influence, and even help define, the future course of modernism.1 Baer herself seemed just that ambitious. Through her paintings and theoretical writings, she troubled both a tradition of formalist criticism and the newly emergent discourse on Minimal art.2 By increasing the depth of her stretchers, hanging the work close to the floor, and painting on the edges of the canvas, Baer decentered established pictorial conventions and exhibition strategies. Using the viewer's physical interaction with the work as a catalyst for the exploration of vision, she instigated a form of radical modernism intended to reinvigorate the self-reflexivity of contemporary painting.3 In short, Baer's canvases promised the disinterested spectator participatory engagement, a tactic associated as much with performative practices as with the theatricality of Minimal art.4