Form as content

Abstract

In American sculpture of the 1960s, the form of the cube appears frequently and is often seen as an emblem of the Minimalist movement. For the most part, this commonality can be said to reflect Minimalist artists’ collective preference for basic shapes and geometric austerity. Yet, for all the critical attention paid to the Minimalist cube, one possibility has rarely been explored in print: namely, the relationship these cubes might share with the emerging discourse of institutional critique. Although an explicit association of the gallery with the cube would not appear in print until 1976, some artists’ made this analogy much earlier, even if this connection was not their stated intention. This thesis explores a new interpretation of the Minimalist cube, focusing on it as an unrecognized participant in the contemporaneous phenomenon of art as institutional critique, in the work of Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Paul Thek, and Lucas Samaras.