ABSTRACT
Katy Siegel, in the exhibition catalogue High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975, noted that the lifting of prohibitions in the late 1960s brought with it the demise of “maximum security painting,” a term that arguably refers to the modernist painting of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Morris Louis. With this in mind, this chapter will examine what conversely will be construed as being a minimum security version of painting. No longer fully bounded or for that matter heavily policed, the categorical boundaries of painting became both increasingly porous such that there emerged a more equivocal approach to the medium, an approach where the artist was now afforded certain rights and freedoms. Taking as its focus the Brushstroke paintings of David Reed together with the abstract paintings of Jack Whitten, the aim of the fifth chapter is to ask what did such rights and freedoms entail and how do they work to structure the terms upon which painting during the mid-1970s in the US were now being given?
