Dissonance and Resonance: Theory and Theatre in the Art of Donald Judd and Robert Morris

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the common grouping of Donald Judd and Robert Morris within minimalism to renegotiate difference between their intervening strategies into modernist art and criticism. When minimalism emerged as an avant-gardist threat and discursive challenge to modernist art during the mid-1960s, many contemporary critics missed the conceptual differences at play between Judd and Morris’ practices. Instead dismissive critics emphasised commonage within the rejection of modernist theory and formalism their art and writings signified. This thesis re-evaluates this art historical pairing of Judd and Morris within modern art by mapping out dissonances and resonances across their aesthetics. The primary contention of this thesis is that the conceptual dissimilarities between Judd and Morris’ minimalist practices extend from their formative artistic explorations. For Judd, this is painting and art criticism, while for Morris it is painting and dance. This thesis pursues a chronological examination of their respective paths towards minimalism and then comparatively analyses their minimalist practices from the early 1960s through to the end of that decade. The respective formal and philosophical problems Judd and Morris engaged with in their early transitory fields open to their conceptual dissonances between them at the site of the minimalism’s contest of the modernist canon