8.3 Late 20th-Century Movements (Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Performance, Feminist Art)

Dematerialization and Identity Politics

During the 1960s and 1970s, a major paradigm shift occurred across Western art. Many artists grew deeply skeptical of the commercial art market, museum institutions, and the traditional veneration of the singular, heroic (typically white male) master painter. Influenced by civil rights movements, second-wave feminism, anti-war protests, and critical theory, avant-garde movements sought to dematerialize the art object (a phrase coined by critic Lucy Lippard). By stripping away emotional narrative, hand craftsmanship, or the physical object altogether, artists re-centered art on ideas, human performance, site-specificity, and identity.

Minimalism: "What You See is What You See"

Minimalism emerged in New York during the early 1960s as a strict reaction against both the emotional, painterly drama of Abstract Expressionism and the commercial figurative imagery of Pop Art. Minimalists sought to create literal, non-referential objects that referred to nothing outside themselves—devoid of metaphor, spiritual symbolism, spatial illusionism, or personal artistic touch.

• Industrial Materials & Industrial Fabrication: Minimalist sculptors rejected traditional hand-carved stone or cast bronze, adopting industrial materials such as sheet aluminum, galvanized iron, plexiglass, firebricks, and fluorescent light tubes. Artworks were frequently fabricated by commercial metal factories based on the artist's mechanical blueprints, removing the artist's hand entirely.
• Donald Judd: The primary theorist of Minimalism. In his seminal 1965 essay Specific Objects, Judd argued that new 3D art was neither painting nor sculpture. Judd created unpainted, factory-fabricated metal and plexiglass boxes cantilevered from gallery walls in vertical "stacks." Judd insisted that his works had no hidden meaning: the physical presence of the geometric object in relation to the surrounding architectural space and the viewer's body was the entire subject of the art. Painter Frank Stella famously summarized this philosophy: "What you see is what you see."
• Dan Flavin: Constructed installations using commercially manufactured fluorescent light tubes arranged in geometric configurations, using emitted colored light to transform the surrounding gallery environment.
• Carl Andre & Maya Lin: Andre arranged raw industrial floor tiles (firebricks, copper plates) directly on the gallery floor, inviting viewers to walk upon them. Decades later, Maya Lin drew upon Minimalist geometry and site-specificity for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) in Washington D.C., cutting a V-shaped black granite wall into the earth inscribed chronologically with fallen soldiers' names, combining minimalist restraint with profound emotional resonance.

Conceptual Art: The Idea as Primary Medium

If Minimalism reduced the art object to its barest industrial essentials, Conceptual Art sought to eliminate the physical art object entirely. Conceptualists asserted that the true essence of art lies in the idea, concept, or process, while the physical manifestation is secondary or disposable.

• Sol LeWitt: Articulated the movement's motto in 1967: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." LeWitt created Wall Drawings consisting of precise written mathematical instructions. The actual drawings were executed on gallery walls by draftspeople and technicians following LeWitt's text, proving that the conceptual plan—not the physical drawing—was the true artwork.
• Joseph Kosuth: Explored semiotics and representation in One and Three Chairs (1965). The installation presents three items: a physical wooden folding chair, a full-scale photograph of that chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word "chair." Kosuth forced viewers to ponder which iteration represents the true concept of a chair: the real object, the visual image, or the linguistic definition.
• On Kawara & John Baldessari: On Kawara produced his lifelong Today series, painting the current date in precise white lettering on monochrome canvases. Baldessari famously recorded a video repeating I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art on a notebook, humorously questioning art education and conceptual repetition.

Performance Art: The Live Body as Medium

During the late 1960s and 1970s, artists increasingly abandoned static objects to use their own physical, living bodies as the primary medium of art. Performance Art emphasized ephemeral, real-time, non-narrative actions taking place before a live audience.

Because performance happens in the moment and vanishes, it actively resisted gallery commercialization and purchasing. Performance art grew out of earlier 1950s Happenings (Allan Kaprow) and Fluxus events (Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, 1964):

• Marina Abramović: Pushed bodily endurance, psychological vulnerability, and audience responsibility to extreme limits. In Rhythm 0 (1974), Abramović stood passive for 6 hours alongside a table of 72 objects (including a rose, feather, knife, and loaded gun), allowing the public to use them on her body as they wished, exposing human cruelty. In The Artist is Present (MoMA, 2010), Abramović sat silently in a chair for 736 hours over three months, maintaining eye contact with individual museum visitors across from her.
• Chris Burden: Investigated physical danger and institutional trust in Shoot (1971), where he had an assistant shoot him in the arm with a rifle from twelve feet away in a gallery.
• Carolee Schneemann: Challenged patriarchal taboos regarding the female body in Interior Scroll (1975), reading a feminist text while pulling a scroll from her vagina.

Feminist Art Movement: Deconstructing the Canon

The Feminist Art Movement emerged in the early 1970s alongside second-wave feminism. Feminist artists sought to dismantle the male-dominated art-historical canon, expose systemic gender bias in museums, reclaim female bodily autonomy, and elevate traditional female craft mediums (textiles, embroidery, ceramics) to fine art status.

• Linda Nochlin: Published the groundbreaking 1971 essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, demonstrating that social, institutional, and educational barriers—rather than a lack of innate talent—historically excluded women from art academies and professional careers.
• Judy Chicago: Directed The Dinner Party (1974–1979), a monumental collaborative installation honoring female historical recovery. The work features a massive triangular dining table set with 39 elaborate place settings on embroidered runners, each featuring a hand-painted porcelain butterfly/vulvar plate representing an important historical or mythological woman (from the Primordial Goddess and Hatshepsut to Artemisia Gentileschi, Emily Dickinson, and Georgia O'Keeffe). The table rests on a Heritage Floor inscribed with the names of 999 other notable women, reclaiming female contribution to Western civilization through traditionally marginalized ceramic and needlework crafts.
• Miriam Schapiro: Co-founded "Femmage" (combining feminism and collage), embedding fabric, lace, and decorative patterns into fine art canvases.
• Cindy Sherman: Created the seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), a series of 69 black-and-white self-portraits where Sherman posed as various female stock archetypes from B-movies and film noir (the damsel in distress, the career woman, the hitchhiker), demonstrating that female identity in mass media is a constructed performance.