in space and in a situation. Although it is difficult to pinpoint this experience, it is not only the constitutive role of the viewer that comes into focus here, but also the spatial and atmospheric conditions.
For Krauss this phenomenological orientation towards experience, something she elaborates primarily in reference to Robert Morris’s sculptures, brought with it not only a new approach to the physicality of the body, but even a kind of compensatory, if not utopian gesture. 47 A viewer-subject, alienated in everyday life from his or her own experiences, was to be re-aligned with them through the experience of art. “This,” Krauss says, “is because the Minimalist subject is in this very displacement returned to its body, re-grounded in a kind of richer, denser subsoil of experience than the paper-thin layer of an autonomous visuality that had been the goal of optical painting.” 48 In the course of time, Krauss revises her original position, acknowledging that the promise of Minimal Art not only remained unredeemed, but to a certain extent had even turned into its opposite. Looking back, she no longer considered Minimal Art to be the seedbed of a richer form of art experience, but rather as having paved the way for its own depletion. Because the Minimal Art object focuses not only on the viewer’s body but also on the surrounding situation, i.e. the exhibition context, this desubstantiation of the art experience also impacts on the museum. For what is in the final instance bereft of content is, Krauss suggests, the historical dimension of the art experience, or, more specifically, a dimension that references the historical. Krauss becomes aware of this at that very moment when, at the end of the 1980s in America, the social function of the museum profoundly changed. A new tax law enabled objects to be sold from collections, which affected the status of the museum collection, as did new spatial concepts, new museum design and presentation forms. Krauss quotes Thomas Krens, then the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a key protagonist in this change, who referred deliberately to Minimal Art in explaining these developments: “It is Minimalism that has reshaped the way we [ … ] look at art: the demands we now put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the space in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial crescendo towards the intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale.” 49 Krens understood that conventional museum architecture was not able to provide the kind of experience that these Minimal objects required. These sculptures prompted him to opt for new design paradigms, preparing and anticipating new spatial concepts that took their cue from warehouses and factories and presentation formats that were geared towards comprehensive, monographic shows. “Compared to the scale of the Minimalist objects, the earlier paintings and sculptures look impossibly tiny and inconsequential, like postcards, and the galleries take on a fussy, crowded, culturally irrelevant look, like so many curio shops,” Krauss observed. 50
When, in 1989, Krauss visited the Panza Collection in Paris and saw an exhibition of works by artists such as Robert Morris, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, she realized in what way Minimal Art indeed heralded a “radical revision” of the museum. The powerful presence of these objects, she wrote, renders the room itself the object of an experience. Thus the museum itself becomes for the viewers an objectified and abstract entity, “from which the collection has withdrawn.” 51 This experience, as Krauss explains, is very intense and effective, but in the final instance remains essentially empty, as it is merely aesthetically and not historically determined. The experience evoked by the Minimal Art object is oriented towards an individual who constitutes him or herself in the act of perception and hence only temporarily, from one moment to the next. This aesthetic experience, in its radical contingency and its dependence on the conditions of the space and its respective situation, creates a specific kind of subjective experience, but not one that can (or intends to) anchor the individual in the coordinates of history. This experience of self is one that neither is nor can be historically underpinned. With Minimal Art, Krauss argues, the museum becomes a space for a new spatial/aesthetic dimension of experience, but is no longer a space where history, or rather, the individual’s rootedness in history, can be experienced:
The encyclopedic museum is intent on telling a story, by arranging before its visitor a particular version of the history of art. The synchronic museum—if we can call it that—would forgo history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial [ … ] 52
Precisely because these objects engender an experience that remains contingent and does not refer to an essentially stable subject, this experience cannot spawn a cultural context such as is traditionally represented by the museum. Instead of “reconciling” the individual with his or her own experiences, Minimal Art, according to Krauss, ultimately serves to underscore what she calls the “utterly fragmented, postmodern subject of contemporary mass culture” 53 that no longer finds the terrain for experience within a historical trajectory. In other words, it nurtured an individual that is subjugated to spectacle.
Indeed, Minimal Art, albeit not in factual terms (as with Happenings or Fluxus events), but with regard to its underlying conception, does not fit into the customary model of history used in museums. Although today Minimal artworks can be grasped as belonging to a specific time and can be represented as such, in terms of their conception they initially excluded a specific type of reference to history. Minimal Art maintains a position beyond the historical determinacy of art and thus also refuses, to a certain extent, to fit into a museum as the mise-en-scène of a sequence of historically determined artifacts. In a certain way, Minimal Art robs this historical narrative of content, because it shifts the meaning of artworks onto the essentially general and indeterminate level of effect. If Tony Smith’s sculptures refer to megaliths, to Egyptian temples and to Herodotus, these references are not legible as the historical source or influence, and instead resort to something indeterminately archaic rather than to a specific historical epoch. 54 Just as Minimal artworks are abstract—with their geometric shapes and qualities as pure objects—and seem to maintain a position outside the representational conventions outlined in art history, so, too, the experience of viewing these artworks remains abstract. This becomes clear, for example, in Smith’s oft-cited anecdote of his night-time experience on the not-yet-completed New Jersey Turnpike. Smith drove down the empty road and reported how this experience, for him, was quasi-aesthetic in nature and yet also shattered all the customary aesthetic orders. “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it,” is how he summarized the experience, and it was clear for him that a reformulation of the aesthetic would also provoke a fundamental change in the conception of art, 55 transgressing the aesthetic experience in a way that was universal. It was precisely this universality that ultimately rendered the experience of these works indeterminate and general.
When Krauss’s essay was published in Texte zur Kunst in 1992,56 it was prefaced by a film still from the absurd Hollywood romantic comedy LA Story, in which the favorite pastime of the protagonist, played by Steve Martin, is speeding on roller skates through museums, something he does twice in the course of the film. First he races through the historical collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and then later through the Modern Art Department at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Euphoric, he enjoys his aesthetic buzz through art history, where the individual artworks pass him by almost like a film. The antithesis to the museum as the location of a collective, historical/cultural memory, as described in Jürgen Habermas’s model of the bourgeois institution intended to enable visitors to experience the formation of the bourgeois individual as a process rooted in history, can hardly be better described: here the museum becomes the site of the potential for hedonistic experience in which a subject is not constituted, but instead loses him or herself, in viewing his or her cultural heritage.
This discussion on the relationship between history and experience allows one to outline the significance of Coleman’s work Box more precisely: How does this artwork address the dilemma between art that is focused on
