Svetlana Batrakova, “The Utopia of ‘Open Art’,” translated from Russian by Christina Lodder, originally published as “Utopiia ‘otkrytogo iskusstva’,” in Inostrannaia literature (May 1981): 222–232 (excerpt)

Svetlana Batrakova reviews developments in American art from Pop art to the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 1970s, identifying a strain of protest against the boredom of the capitalist world. This chapter contains a systematic analysis of these phenomena from the triumph of Pop over Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s (which she links to radical youth moments) up to the late 1970s. The American artist Sol LeWitt creates spatial “minimal art”: he places a wooden cube colored grey or some other simple volumes, frames, or figures in a windowless room, with almost colorless walls. Minimalism often approaches Conceptual art, finding in its cubes and blocks signs of intellectual discoveries or a new creative method. But Minimalist works of art are thinly covered with indifference and fatigue, like grey dust. The famous American Pop artist Jasper Johns, who created a series of Minimalist paintings in the 1970s, acknowledged that he is usually bored when he is working.