Museum Theater

In this special presentation, Anne Wagner, Class of 1936 Chair in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, will consider the work of Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt in relation to Minimalism and the modern repackaging of time.

Wagner writes: “For us moderns, time has changed. It has become a quantity, an investment, which we save, borrow, waste, and spend. Often we run out of it, though occasionally we have a little to spare. Only then, like our machines, do we switch ‘off.'

“It was the forms of Minimalism that in the 1960s were most successful, and most influential, in reducing art's temporal demands to, well, a minimum, for both viewer and maker alike. Repetition and geometry were the movement's primary means, as by now is well known. But what is much less obvious is how and why some users of these straightforward sixties devices aimed for-and achieved-such utterly different perceptual effects. Anne Truitt, for example, speaks of her sculpture's ability to ‘disarm time.' And in Agnes Martin's paintings, each line marks the duration of its making in and as its trace.”

Anne Wagner is the author of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (1986), Three Artists (Three Women) (1996), and Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (2005). A book of her essays, A House Divided: On Recent American Art, will appear in 2011; in progress is Behaving Globally, commissioned by Princeton University Press. In September, Wagner will take up the newly created position of Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator at Tate Britain.

This program continues on Saturday on the UC Berkeley campus, with talks by a dozen of Wagner's former students and a conversation between Wagner and Kaja Silverman, UC Berkeley professor of rhetoric and film. For further information, please visit ls.berkeley.edu/dept/arthistory or call (510) 643-7290.

Copresented by UC Berkeley's Department of Art History, Program in Critical Theory, and Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities.