MINIMAL OBJECTS IN MICROSOUND
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both of the object at large and of its constituent parts. We accept that a onefoot-tall sculpture of the Virgin Mary is at least somewhat of a realistic representation, just as we overlook disproportions among her body parts in order to accept as realistic the larger whole of her form. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the boundaries between art and viewer began to fall under attack, and the chief object of that attack was the premise of illusion. Picasso was one of the first to dismantle illusion in sculpture, with his Guitar (1912), a chimera combining elements of the ready-made, sculpture, and collage that threatened to undo the cordoning off between art object and its surroundings (Foster et al. 2004, 37). American art critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1960 that what distinguishes modernist art is its focus on the elements inherent to a particular medium. Modernist painting, for example, does not try to create the illusion of three-dimensional perspective so common in earlier painting but instead emphasizes the flatness of the canvas and the materiality of paint and brushstrokes. In so doing, modernist painting renounces any attempt at emulating sculpture, focusing instead on its own “area of competence” (Greenberg 1982). Many subsequent artists, especially those who would later be called minimalists, perpetuated this critique of illusion. Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd’s manifesto “Specific Objects” championed the creation of “threedimensional art,” works that were neither illusionistic like premodernist painting nor piecemeal composites like traditional sculpture: Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. . . . The new three-dimensional work doesn’t constitute a movement, school or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. . . . Three-dimensionality is not as near being simply a container as painting and sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends to that. But now painting and sculpture are less neutral, less containers, more defined, not undeniable and unavoidable. They are particular forms circumscribed after all, producing fairly definite qualities. Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms. (Judd 2003, 824)
Hal Foster explains “specific objects” as follows: By radically reducing the elements in a work to such a degree that all would connect self-evidently to the unitary shape, Judd hoped not only to cancel composition but also to eliminate the other aspect of the a priori, namely the sense of an idea or intention that exists prior to the making of the work in such a way so that it seems to lie inside the object like its