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Interview: Ursula Meyer and Lucy R. Lippard

UM: How did you happen to be interested in what you called Eccentric Abstraction at a time when Minimalism was at its height, in the fall of 1966? It was a totally different avenue, wasn't it?

LL: [[strikethrough]]One of the things that was most clear at the time was that most of the works in the Eccentric Abstraction show [[strikethrough]]weren't so much different from primary structures and the so-called minimal art as they were very much affected by it and also trying to open it up more. Most of them [[strikethrough]]were modular in form, quite clear precise, repetitive single things. But they also incorporated other aspects such as change, flexibility, exotic materials. There was [[strikethrough]]a kind of concentration on inherent change, in Bourgeois, Hesse, Kuehn, Sonnier, Nauman particularly. Nauman's rubber streamer pieces were the most radical things, [[strikethrough]]. A lot of the work looked very ugly at that point, in comparison with the clean and often elegant spareness of primary structures. Nauman's clump of rubber streamers dropped on the floor [[strikethrough]] was v ery close to what Bob Morris did later, but [[strikethrough]] the works weren't reproduced in Morris' 1968 "Anti-form" article.[[strikethrough]]

UM: Do you see [[strikethrough]] a strong relationship between anti-form and eccentric abstraction? 

LL: I [[strikethrough]] dislike both terms. Eccentric Abstraction was only supposed to be the title of the show, not a kind of art; I've regretted it ever since. I bet Morris feels the same way about anti-form. [[strikethrough]] The work isn't against form, it's just involved with another kind of form that takes its shape from the material's properties rather than from a pre-conceive d fixed shape; it has built-in changes. The kind of neutrality stressed by Primary Structures was really more anti-formalist, in that it got rid of making better or worse compositions, but of course that's different from anti-form. Anyway, since several of the artists in the eccentric show later were dubbed anti-form, there's obviously a connection. I wasn't aware in 1966 [[strikethrough]] a lot of the implications [[strikethrough]] those artists were introducing; I