Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to ...

Robert Morris. Four Mirrored Cubes. 1965.hard Richter's glass panes in metal frames, both emerging between 1965 and1967. Or, as in the early work of Robert Barry (such as his Painting in Four Parts,1967, in the FER-Collection), where the square, monochrome, canvas objectsnow seemed to assume the role of mere architectural demarcation. Functioningas decentered painterly objects, they delimit the external architectural space in amanner analogous to the serial or central composition of earlier Minimal workthat still defined internal pictorial or sculptural space. Or, as in Barry's squarecanvas (1967), which is to be placed at the exact center of the architecturalsupport wall, a work is conceived as programmatically shifting the reading of itfrom a centered, unified, pictorial object to an experience of architectural contingence,and as thereby incorporating the supplementary and overdeterminingstrategies of curatorial placement and conventions of installation (traditionallydisavowed in painting and sculpture) into the conception of the work itself.And thirdly-and most often-this transition is performed in the "simple"rotation of the square, as originally evident in Naum Gabo's famous diagramfrom 1937 where a volumetric and a stereometric cube are juxtaposed inorder to clarify the inherent continuity between planar, stereometric, and volumetricforms. This rotation generated cubic structures as diverse as HansHaacke's Condensation Cube (1963-65), Robert Morris's Four Mirrored Cubes(1965), or Larry Bell's simultaneously produced Mineral Coated Glass Cubes, and