Anne Wagner: Women's Time: Martin and Truitt in the Moment of Minimalism

In this special presentation, Anne Wagner, Class of 1936 Chair in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, considers the work of Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt in relation to Minimalism and the modern repackaging of time.

Wagner writes: For us moderns, time has changed. It has become a quantity, an investment, which we save, borrow, waste, and spend. Often we run out of it, though occasionally we have a little to spare. Only then, like our machines, do we switch off.

It was the forms of Minimalism that in the 1960s were most successful, and most influential, in reducing arts temporal demands to, well, a minimum, for both viewer and maker alike. Repetition and geometry were the movements primary means, as by now is well known. But what is much less obvious is how and why some users of these straightforward sixties devices aimed for—and achieved—such utterly different perceptual effects. Anne Truitt, for example, speaks of her sculptures ability to disarm time. And in Agnes Martins paintings, each line marks the duration of its making in and as its trace.

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[ixisflower]

Can you repost this excellent lecture? The tranmission is fragmentary and huge portions of the speech go dead silent during the showing of the slides leaving gaps in the continuity. Any intelligent discussion of these two exceptional artists warrants our complete attention.