Art: Blunt Objects

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But to make Minimalism something more than a philosophical pleasure, most artists had to go outside its orthodoxies. For Rainbow Pickett, Judy Chicago made a variation on Morris' plain beams but painted each one a different pastel color, which immediately sets off associations with femininity that the pure Minimalist object is expected to forego. It was that kind of thing that a later generation of Postminimalists would do--keep the language of simplified impersonal forms but restore associations to the outside world. At the Guggenheim is British artist Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), a 1995 piece made by casting the empty space under various chairs in colored resins. The resulting blocks, their sides bearing channels made by the imprint of chair legs, are lined up like good Minimalist boxes. But once you know that they represent the overlooked spaces of the world, they take on a modest measure of poignancy. Poignancy? If Judd had lived to see that, he would have crawled into one of his own boxes and shut the lid.