ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the established discourses around the critique of art object that are related to minimalism and conceptual art and argues that such a critique was explicit already in task-dance and event-score practices of the late 1950s and early 1960s. There are at least two familiar art theoretical discourses that have focused on the negation of the medium-specific art object in art in post-war period in North America. The first is a discourse around minimalist art practices from the mid- to late 1960s, in which the artists Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt are central. The second major discourse around the negation of the medium-specific art object related to 1960s art practices in North American context is Lucy Lippard’s thoughts on the “dematerialized art object”. The nuanced distinction between Objekt and Gegenstand introduced with critical idealism is crucial for what Howard Caygill has described as Kant’s “extremely subtle” conception of the object.
