In her acclaimed artist journal Daybook (1982), the pioneering Minimalist Anne Truitt wrote about the subtle measure of a sensation: “a discrimination in acuity called a Just Noticeable Diference, J. N. D. for short.” She applied the term to an alignment of events in her life and career, but it might have been just as well addressed to her sculptures, with their complex internal proportions and delicate shifts in color. So much of Minimal art is about waiting for a phase change to occur: a quiet calibration of one’s sensibilities that rewards the beholder with a new appreciation of the quotidian environment and the things in it. Minimalism is thus demanding of its beholders in a way that can be polarizing—look no further than the example of Richard Serra’s now-dismantled Tilted Arc (1981) as proof. It is also distinctly demanding for those of us in the art world in particular: it is attractive precisely because of its di culty and reticence. Minimalism’s pliancy to advanced theory was as important in the 1960s as it is today, and there’s something that feels hard-won about mastering it. Since Hal Foster described it as a “crux” in The Return of the Real—efectively naming it the culmination of the modernist project and the opening foray into postmodernism—no other postwar style has had quite the same cachet. To give you a sense of a historiographical timeline, Edward A. Vazquez and Dawna L. Schuld—whose books are here under review—and I were newly minted PhDs and freshly on the academic job market at the same time ten years ago. For those like us in graduate school in the early 2000s, James Meyer’s comprehensive Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001) inaugurated Minimalism as a subject for historical inquiry. Meyer signiicantly brought together parts of the critical literature that used to be opposed or isolated in their opinions of Minimalism’s importance. He deciphered the toughest bits of phenomenology (especially the now-ubiquitous Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty) enough to whet our appetite for more, and he gave us an unprecedented diversity of names, dates, and important exhibitions on which to follow up and expand. The generosity of Meyer’s endeavor consists in allowing us to argue with and against him to make an art history out of Minimalism. At least, that’s the efect his book had on me and possibly others; and for that reason, I think it bears mention in light of the coincidence of new books on Minimalism that have come to press in the latter part of the 2010s (my monograph on Truitt was published at the end of 2015). Vazquez’s academically written volume, Aspects: Fred Sandback’s Sculpture, is an erudite examination of an artist almost wholly identiied by spare installations of yarn pulled tight between the loor and ceiling, wall to wall, or between wall and loor. These arrangements have the unusual efect of delineating imaginary geometric planes in the pure space of a room. Coming upon such a plane, the beholder might almost think that it is an ultra-thin, ultra-transparent pane of glass. In causing a momentary oscillation between materiality and empty space, Vazquez would have us know that “approaching the work’s thresholds laces the broader room with a heightened tangibility and encourages a particular attentiveness to movement within this newly evident, if ever present, materiality” (2). The tangibility of empty space pronounces an incommensurable situation that is precisely the point of Sandback’s economical work: in ruminating upon it, we comprehend that “the physicality of encounter and of the particular tenuous awareness created between his linear inlections through interiors and the form of the space itself could not be dissolved into a project apart from the here and now of embodied experience” (4). To return to Truitt’s apt phrasing, if we are looking for the “J. N. D.” characteristic of Minimalist art, this is almost certainly its epitome. Vazquez’s monograph is chronological, including an introduction, four chapters (covering from the 1960s to the 1990s), and an afterword (a “coda,” concerning the artist’s untimely death and legacy). The irst chapter contends with the 1960s origins of Sandback’s work, and his consistency and diference from those we might expect: the Minimalists Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella. There is a brilliant and unexpected passage on Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, which historicizes a link between the era’s obsession with embodied and/ or psychological perception and, indeed, formal analysis: a “longing for surfaces” implied by art history that Sandback’s work renders timid (33). By the end of the chapter, Vazquez has laid out a genealogy more fully. Sandback’s Minimal-art preoccupations grew into Conceptual-art ones by the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the artist labored through conceptualism to reine his ultimately Minimalist project concerning the beholder’s physical experience of his installations in situ. The second chapter leads the reader to believe that it is a theorization of artist’s books by Sandback, but over its course reveals itself to be about the spatialized yet printerly logic of some of the artist’s 1970s sculptures and the broader relationship between printed matter and installation as a period aesthetic. The third chapter aims to advance the concerns of Sandback’s early work to what we might call his mature practice in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Land U-shaped yarn installations that conjure the false-pane experience I described earlier. A subsection, “Plate Glass Perspectives,” covers this aspect forthrightly, to sum: “The suggestion of a plane builds the illusion of an object into a space constantly changing, relecting the materiality of an interior back on the viewer in an architectural and bodily environment made tangible through reversal” (107). Tangible but ever slipping away: this feature of Sandback’s work has an afective dimension. It is not until Vazquez’s afterword that he takes up Andrea Fraser’s essay “Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?” published in Grey Room in 2006—deliberately far enough after the artist’s death so as not to confuse the artist’s work with his depression and eventual suicide—to address how paradoxes of space might work on the viewer’s emotions. That Vazquez ends his book in this way seems satisfying because of how he foregrounds bodily connection throughout the text; Fraser’s rendering it as absence gets to the heart of how Sandback’s work compels.

中文翻译：

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注意的微妙艺术

在她广受赞誉的艺术家期刊 Daybook（1982）中，开创性的极简主义者安妮·特鲁伊特 (Anne Truitt) 写到了一种微妙的感觉衡量标准：“一种敏锐度的歧视，称为 Just Noticeable Diference，简称 JND。” 她将这个词应用于她生活和职业生涯中的一系列事件，但它可能同样适用于她的雕塑，因为它们具有复杂的内部比例和微妙的色彩变化。如此多的极简艺术都是关于等待相变发生：一种对个人情感的安静校准，以对日常环境及其中事物的新欣赏来奖励旁观者。因此，极简主义以一种可能两极分化的方式对其旁观者提出要求——看看理查德塞拉现已拆除的倾斜弧（Tilted Arc）（1981）的例子就是证明。它对我们这些艺术界的人也有着明显的要求：正是因为它的困难和沉默，它才有吸引力。极简主义对高级理论的顺从在 1960 年代和今天一样重要，掌握它感觉来之不易。自从哈尔·福斯特 (Hal Foster) 在《真实的回归》(The Return of the Real) 中将其描述为“症结”——有效地将其命名为现代主义项目的高潮和对后现代主义的开创性尝试——以来，没有其他战后风格拥有与此相同的声望。为了让您了解历史时间线，Edward A. Vazquez 和 Dawna L. Schuld（他们的书正在审查中）和我在十年前的同一时间刚获得博士学位并且刚刚进入学术就业市场。对于像我们这样在 2000 年代初读研究生的人来说，James Meyer 的全面极简主义：六十年代的艺术与辩论（2001 年）开创了极简主义作为历史探究的主题。迈耶显着地汇集了过去在他们对极简主义重要性的看法中反对或孤立的部分批评文献。他破译了现象学中最难的部分（尤其是现在无处不在的莫里斯·梅洛 - 庞蒂的《知觉现象学》）足以激起我们对更多的兴趣，他为我们提供了前所未有的多样性名称、日期和重要展览以供跟进并展开。迈耶努力的慷慨之处在于让我们可以与他争论或反对他，以从极简主义中创造艺术史。至少，这就是他的书对我和其他人的影响；正因为如此，鉴于 2010 年代后期出版的关于极简主义的新书的巧合（我关于 Truitt 的专着于 2015 年底出版），我认为值得一提。Vazquez 的学术著作《Aspects: Fred Sandback's Sculpture》是对一位艺术家的博学审查，几乎完全通过在地板和天花板之间、墙对墙或墙和地板之间拉紧纱线的备用装置来识别。这些布置具有在房间的纯空间中描绘假想几何平面的不同寻常的效果。看到这样的平面，旁观者几乎会认为它是一块超薄、超透明的玻璃板。在物质性和空性之间引起短暂的振荡，巴斯克斯会让我们知道，“接近作品的门槛会让更广阔的房间更加有形，并鼓励人们特别注意这种新近明显（如果曾经存在）的物质性中的运动”（2）。空旷空间的有形性表明了一种不可通约的情况，这正是 Sandback 经济作品的重点：在反思它时，我们理解“相遇的物理性以及在他通过内部的线性转换和建筑的形式之间创造的特殊脆弱的意识”。空间本身不能被分解成一个项目，离开了此时此地的具体体验”（4）。回到 Truitt 恰当的措辞，如果我们正在寻找极简主义艺术的“JND”特征，这几乎可以肯定是它的缩影。巴斯克斯的专着是按时间顺序排列的，包括引言、四章（涵盖从 1960 年代到 1990 年代）和后记（关于艺术家英年早逝和遗产的“尾声”）。第一章讨论了 Sandback 作品的 1960 年代起源，以及他与我们可能期望的极简主义者唐纳德·贾德、罗伯特·莫里斯和弗兰克·斯特拉的一致性和不同之处。恩斯特·贡布里希 (Ernst Gombrich) 的《艺术与幻觉》中有一段精彩而出人意料的段落，它将时代对具身和/或心理感知的痴迷与形式分析之间的联系历史化：Sandback 的作品所呈现的艺术史所暗示的“对表面的渴望”胆小（33）。在本章结束时，巴斯克斯更全面地列出了谱系。到 1960 年代末和 1970 年代初，Sandback 对极简艺术的关注发展为观念艺术，这位艺术家通过概念主义努力控制他最终的极简主义项目，涉及观看者在现场对他的装置的身体体验。第二章让读者相信它是 Sandback 对艺术家书籍的理论化，但在其过程中，它揭示了艺术家 1970 年代一些雕塑的空间化但印刷逻辑以及印刷品与装置之间更广泛的关系，如一种时代美学。第三章旨在将 Sandback 早期作品的关注点推进到我们可以称之为他在 1970 年代末和 1980 年代初的成熟实践中：Land U 形纱线装置，让人联想到我之前描述的假窗体验。“平板玻璃透视图”小节直截了当地涵盖了这一方面，总结如下：“平面的暗示将物体的幻觉构建到一个不断变化的空间中，在通过逆转变得有形的建筑和身体环境中，将内部的物质性反映给观众”（107）。有形但永远消失：桑德巴克作品的这一特征具有情感维度。直到 Vazquez 的后记，他才开始阅读 Andrea Fraser 的文章“为什么 Fred Sandback 的作品让我哭泣？” 2006 年在 Gray Room 发表——故意在艺术家去世后足够远，以免将艺术家的作品与他的抑郁和最终自杀混淆——以解决空间悖论如何影响观众的情绪。巴斯克斯以这种方式结束他的书似乎很令人满意，因为他在整个文本中突出了身体联系；