For it points to a moment when history was revoked, as the prologue of a story in which history lives on with a particular tenacity. It is a recounting of singular emptiness. And the force of this construction was its power to topple History as the foundation itself of value. Using a strategy of historical reference, the Olympia and the Déjeuner were erected on Old Master groundplans, structures completely given over to the forms and meanings of the present. With a certain relish those tales relive that moment of subversion, when the very models of academic value-history, classicism-were turned upside-down to become the empty vessels into which could be poured the perceptions of a modern consciousness. For sooner or later every account of modern art feels compelled to turn to Manet and tell of his attack on History Painting. The special irony of that ingrained use of history as meaning, is that it is applied to a tradition which prides itself on an originating act of historical demolition. The assumption is that they are synonymous. The same assumption operates when, in answer to a question like, “What does this painting by Stella mean?” the reply comes, “It’s about his relationship to Johns and Newman.” The question asked was about meaning the answer that is inevitably given is about historical context. The assumption behind the use of both these terms seems to be that the demarcations of historical time carry within themselves the profile of meaning––that in themselves they are adequate to characterize or define the deep import of works of art. “Dematerialization” functions similarly as a chronological counter, by scripting as a new act in the historical drama the flight of certain work from the material, concrete arena of the object. 1 “Post-Minimalism,” by insisting upon the temporal divide between these two generations of artists, signals that it is acting as a conceptual marker as well: asserting a separation of meaning between the two groups, a separation in which the gears of sensibility mesh with the supposed shift in historical time.

Operationally, “post-Minimalism” acts to drive a historical wedge between the Minimalist art of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, and Carl Andre, and the work of a younger generation which began to achieve prominence by the end of the 1960s.

For, while I understand the politics of their usage, their meaning eludes me insofar as it attaches itself to the art they label. I am thinking of the extreme disjunction between the strategic value of those terms and their capacity to signify. I AM THINKING OF THE terms “post-Minimalism” and “dematerialization”-of how they have become entrenched within the lexicon of contemporary criticism. One must chance that-start from affection and new sounds.

Every scenario and every mise-en-scène have always been constructed by or on memories.

Minimalist drawing meaning