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Expanding Concepts of Sculpture

To the Things Themselves! Phenomenology and Minimal Art

Dominic Willsdon, To the Things Themselves! Phenomenology and Minimal Art  Phenomenology is a school of thought founded by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others developed and expanded phenomenology to address art, literature, society and politics. The publication of Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) in English in 1962 had an important influence on American artists and art theorists, such as Donald Judd and Michael Fried, on both sides of the debate about the value of Minimal Art. In this talk, Dominic Willsdon explains the essence of phenomenological thinking - its belief in the need to see past our ideas about things to describe and so let us experience the things themselves as they appear in the everyday world - and explores the meaning, from a phenomenological point of view, of Minimal art works such as those of Donald Judd.Further ReadingM. Merleau-Ponty, 'Cezanne's Doubt' (1945), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. G. A. Johnson, Northwestern UP, 1994.D. Moran & T. Mooney eds.,The Phenomenology Reader, Routledge, 2002.S. Connor, CP, or A Few Don'ts (And Dos) By A Cultural Phenomenologist, at www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/cp/