When, in 1989, Krauss visited the Panza Collection in Paris and saw an exhibition of works by artists such as Robert Morris, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, she realized in what way Minimal Art indeed heralded a “radical revision” of the museum. The powerful presence of these objects, she wrote, renders the room itself the object of an experience. Thus the museum itself becomes for the viewers an objectified and abstract entity, “from which the collection has withdrawn.” 51 This experience, as Krauss explains, is very intense and effective, but in the final instance remains essentially empty, as it is merely aesthetically and not historically determined. The experience evoked by the Minimal Art object is oriented towards an individual who constitutes him or herself in the act of perception and hence only temporarily, from one moment to the next. This aesthetic experience, in its radical contingency and its dependence on the conditions of the space and its respective situation, creates a specific kind of subjective experience, but not one that can (or intends to) anchor the individual in the coordinates of history. This experience of self is one that neither is nor can be historically underpinned. With Minimal Art, Krauss argues, the museum becomes a space for a new spatial/aesthetic dimension of experience, but is no longer a space where history, or rather, the individual’s rootedness in history, can be experienced:
The encyclopedic museum is intent on telling a story, by arranging before its visitor a particular version of the history of art. The synchronic museum—if we can call it that—would forgo history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial [ … ] 52
Precisely because these objects engender an experience that remains contingent and does not refer to an essentially stable subject, this experience cannot spawn a cultural context such as is traditionally represented by the museum. Instead of “reconciling” the individual with his or her own experiences, Minimal Art, according to Krauss, ultimately serves to underscore what she calls the “utterly fragmented, postmodern subject of contemporary mass culture” 53 that no longer finds the terrain for experience within a historical trajectory. In other words, it nurtured an individual that is subjugated to spectacle.
Indeed, Minimal Art, albeit not in factual terms (as with Happenings or Fluxus events), but with regard to its underlying conception, does not fit into the customary model of history used in museums. Although today Minimal artworks can be grasped as belonging to a specific time and can be represented as such, in terms of their conception they initially excluded a specific type of reference to history. Minimal Art maintains a position beyond the historical determinacy of art and thus also refuses, to a certain extent, to fit into a museum as the mise-en-scène of a sequence of historically determined artifacts. In a certain way, Minimal Art robs this historical narrative of content, because it shifts the meaning of artworks onto the essentially general and indeterminate level of effect. If Tony Smith’s sculptures refer to megaliths, to Egyptian temples and to Herodotus, these references are not legible as the historical source or influence, and instead resort to something indeterminately archaic rather than to a specific historical epoch. 54 Just as Minimal artworks are abstract—with their geometric shapes and qualities as pure objects—and seem to maintain a position outside the representational conventions outlined in art history, so, too, the experience of viewing these artworks remains abstract. This becomes clear, for example, in Smith’s oft-cited anecdote of his night-time experience on the not-yet-completed New Jersey Turnpike. Smith drove down the empty road and reported how this experience, for him, was quasi-aesthetic in nature and yet also shattered all the customary aesthetic orders. “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it,” is how he summarized the experience, and it was clear for him that a reformulation of the aesthetic would also provoke a fundamental change in the conception of art, 55 transgressing the aesthetic experience in a way that was universal. It was precisely this universality that ultimately rendered the experience of these works indeterminate and general.
When Krauss’s essay was published in Texte zur Kunst in 1992,56 it was prefaced by a film still from the absurd Hollywood romantic comedy LA Story, in which the favorite pastime of the protagonist, played by Steve Martin, is speeding on roller skates through museums, something he does twice in the course of the film. First he races through the historical collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and then later through the Modern Art Department at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Euphoric, he enjoys his aesthetic buzz through art history, where the individual artworks pass him by almost like a film. The antithesis to the museum as the location of a collective, historical/cultural memory, as described in Jürgen Habermas’s model of the bourgeois institution intended to enable visitors to experience the formation of the bourgeois individual as a process rooted in history, can hardly be better described: here the museum becomes the site of the potential for hedonistic experience in which a subject is not constituted, but instead loses him or herself, in viewing his or her cultural heritage.
This discussion on the relationship between history and experience allows one to outline the significance of Coleman’s work Box more precisely: How does this artwork address the dilemma between art that is focused on experience and the structural framework of the visual arts that necessitate duration and continuity? To what extent does it reflect the relationship between artistic production and the culture of the spectacle?
In Minimal Art, it is the human being that experiences itself as a body standing in an indeterminate manner outside power, sexuality and history. In contrast, Coleman gives experience a historical-materialist contour. With Minimal Art, the intention was to oppose the art criticism of the day by producing a form of art that refused any subjective/linguistic appropriation. In Box , Coleman introduces a dimension of experience that does not exclude meaning, language, critique and history, but gives these categories a concrete form as the necessary basis for all experience. The subject is presented in a socio-geopolitical context, and at the same time enacted on the uncontrolled level of affect and physicality, thus in this regard unconscious responses. The body is thereby conceived as material, as a semiotic bearer of meaning, and, simultaneously, as a psycho-physiological being.57 In this way, Coleman roots the individual and the individual’s experience in a concrete historical context. But he does not do so out of the wish to re-create a coherent tradition. Coleman’s work operates instead with a (Benjamin-like) dialectic between the fragmentary presentation of a historical figure and a present experience. It is as if the intention were to constitute an individual and an idea of history in the process of disappearing, one that results from a depiction and, simultaneously, exists on the very liminal boundary of that which can be represented or experienced. This process is precisely allegorized in the theme of the boxing match. Joyce Carol Oates has written that “every boxing match is a story—a unique and highly condensed drama without words.” She suggests that “boxers are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings.”58
Benjamin Buchloh