Encountering Mikala Dwyer's art with Eva Hesse and minimalism
This paper addresses a tendency in recent art history and criticism that I wish to link to a particular reading of the legacy of Minimalism. This tendency is contoured by what Stephen Melville calls the positionality of the interpreter, a mode of operation that has become typical of feminist writings about art. [1] A positional approach supposes that having reflexively staged the viewing position from which she speaks, having seen herself in the very act of seeing, the interpreter/spectator is then authorised to interpret works of art from her specific point of view, according to her knowledges, wishes and intentions. A number of theoretical and artistic developments of the last three decades could be said to converge in the logic of positionality, but importantly for this paper it is Minimalism that is regularly identified as a forerunner of such spectator- prioritising heuristics. The following both investigates these lineages and tendencies and asks what their ethical and theoretical implications are for our encounters with works of art? In the process I want to argue that the work of Mikala Dwyer, which has often been understood by critics in the terms summarised above, stages another tale of our engagement by art objects.
In a recent appraisal of the legacy of Minimalism, Ha! Foster writes that minimalist art marks a shift from the objective emphasis of formalism to the subjective orientation of phenomenology. [2] As many commentators have attested, although minimalist practices adopted geometric forms, serial structures and industrial materials, these features operated in a way that reflected the bodily presence and participation of the viewer.
Foster concurs with what others have said of Minimalism-that it both insisted on the viewer's role in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline