Viewing page 16 of 71

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Ursula Meyer

Lucy R. Lippard:   A Discussion with Editor (December 1969)

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?

IL: Well, one of things that was most clear at the time was that the worlds in the Eccentric Abstraction show (Nauman, Hesse, Sonnier, Viner, Adams, Bourgeois, Potts, Kuehm) 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 the pieces in that show were modular in form, quite clear, precise, repetitive, single things. But they also incorporated other aspects such as change, flexibility, exotic materials. There was especially a kind of concentration on inherent change, in Bourgeois, Hesse, Kuehm, Sonnier and Nauman [[strikethrough]] and Vinor [[/strikethrough]] particularly. Nauman's rubber streamer pieces were the most radical things, I guess. A lot of the work looked very ugly at that point, in com-parison with the clean and often elegant spareness dropped on the floor was v ery close to what Bob Morris did later. For some reason these works weren't reproduced in Morris' 1969 "Anti-form" article, which named the later [[strikethrough]] movement [[/strikethrough]] tendency.
UM: Do you see [[strikethrough]] some [[/strikethrough]] a strong relationship between anti-form and eccentric abstraction?
LL: I [[strikethrough]] intensely [[/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]] It's just a lousy phrase because [[/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-conceived 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, xxx since several of the artists in the eccentric show later were dubbed anti-form, there's [[strikethrough]] obviously [[/strikethrough]] a connection. I wasn't aware in 1966 of all the implications of that inherent change those artists introduced;