A Lesson in Architecture: 'Architecturalness' in the Work of Mid-Century American Abstract Artists

Abstract

For a period of time in the middle of last century the work of leading American abstract artists consistently and repeatedly indicated the use of architectural elements and methods; the stacks of Donald Judd, Fred Sandback’s Vertical Constructions in string, Carl Andre’s concrete-block Equivalents, the grids of Agnes Martin. Art historical discussion of the period generally emphasises the differences between the practices of art and architecture, but, viewed through the lens of architecture, an obdurate engagement with modernist architectural concerns unites the work of many of the key emergent artists of America’s post-war to 1970s period. This research traces the nature of the architectural influence on the work described, and considers why and how architectural references became so important to a generation of artists defined by their rejection of historical norms. The work considered is predicated on general counter-culture sentiments particularly apparent from the early twentieth century, but additionally on the development of abstraction, which found its feet in Europe, and got into its stride in post-war America. By the end of the 1950s the result was a profusion of ground-breaking art, the common thread in this wide-ranging body of work being an ideal of essence. Leading architects questioned self-reflexive and ‘abstract’ Modernist architecture from as early as 1966, when Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, marking the beginning of the end of the International Style. Vincent Scully described the book, at the time, as “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture, of 1923.”1 Referential Post-modernism resulted, academised by the nineteen-eighties as Deconstructivism. In 1984 Philip Johnson was responsible for the AT&T Building, and Eisenman’s Wexner Center opened in 1989. My view is that while architecture may have turned away from modernism, a group of American artists in the same period, knowingly, or not, took up the reductivist baton of modernist architecture and continued to explore its means as a relevant, and critical, engagement with contemporary visual arts. In 2004 an American curator wrote, that, “Connections and comparisons may on occasion be based on morphological likeness alone, which can, in the best of cases, lead to new insights into how an artwork functions in the world.”2 Implicit in this statement is the more general idea that choosing a singular viewpoint for reconsidering the position something familiar holds in the world, may offer different and unexpected instruction. It is the intention of this thesis to use the model described to investigate what seems, according to the architectural paradigm, an unaccounted-for relationship between a stream of abstract American art of the 1960s, and architectural modernism; to review a group of artworks from this stream, selected specifically from an architectural viewpoint, with the goal of achieving fresh insight into the way relations between the sibling visual arts have operated, and might yet function.