John Curley

Around 1962, ‘formalism’ could indicate methodological purity in the realms of both art and science. With camps in both disciplines attempting to minimize human intervention in the realm of decision-making, ‘formalism’ could take on mechanical overtones, thereby linking art and science in profound ways.  This essay considers the ways in which the austere abstract paintings of Morris Louis from the years surrounding 1960 brings these dual formalisms into focus. When viewed through the criticism of Clement Greenberg and the near-unwavering faith President Kennedy’s administration placed in new technocratic ways of waging war, Morris's paintings can be seen as beatified expressions of a mechanical rationality that also brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Through deep engagement with Greenberg’s criticism and media archives, the essay forges links between Greenberg’s version of Louis and the dark sides of this rationality. The article concludes by locating ways to consider Louis’s paintings outside of the Greenbergian straitjacket – recapturing the strangeness and chaotic nature of the painter’s practice.

Artists covered by entries: Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack, Hermann Glöckner, Gerhard Richter, Konrad Klapheck, Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg, Wolf Vostell, Peter Brüning, Thomas Bayrle, Ulrich Baehr, Evelyn Richter, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Hanne Darboven, Raffael Rheinsberg, Marcel Odenbach.

The Life magazine " Picture of the Week " from May 22, 1944, still shocks nearly seventy years later. In this photograph by Ralph Crane (1913 –1988), viewers see a woman writing her boyfriend, an American soldier, a thank-you note for a strange and horrific gift: a Japanese soldier's skull. Passed by American censors and redeployed as anti-American propaganda in Japan, this photograph exposes the perils of mixing a foreign war, photography, and the home front mass media. This essay has two primary components. First, it discusses the formal and iconographic qualities of the photograph, which, in tandem with its barbaric backstory, help produce its deeply unsettling effects. Second, incorporating thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 –1900) and Maurice Blanchot (1907 –2003), it explores the way that the " Picture of the Week " attempts and subsequently fails to rationalize the depicted brutality. This failure not only serves to emphasize the barbarity on display but also leads to a broader concluding discussion about the nature of photography and its attempts to communicate the unthinkable to a distant home front audience.