The Lost Contingent: Paul Maenz's Prophetic 1967 Event and the Ambiguities of Historical Priority

Abstract

“All this will one day be yours, sweetheart.” Paul Maenz was not making any promises to me, but was reaching back to before he became a major German dealer to translate the enigmatic pledge on the catalogue for one of the first exhibitions he organized. The adventurous show had presented loosely arranged installations, many using natural materials, in advance of the exhibition of similar works in New York. It was astonishing to uncover this prehistory of Postminimalism before Earthworks—and more broadly Postminimalism—began to coalesce as an identifiable style later in the 1960s and the early 1970s. Maenz's exhibition/event is unmentioned in English-language discussions of the 1960s except for a terse description by Lucy Lippard in her 1973 Six Years chronology, the instigation of my investigation.1 But even more provocative is the fact that while the show seems to have been all but unknown in the United States, close variations of some of the European works in it were made within a few years by other artists, chiefly Americans. Did those repetitions result from knowledge of these precedents, or were they parallel discoveries illustrating the increasingly international dynamic of the late- 1960s art scene?