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This study, "Minimalist Sculpture: The Consequences of Artifice", was initially prompted by the wish to examine the case for a materialist approach to modern sculpture. Such an inquiry needed to address not only the substantiality of material and its process, but also the formative role of ideology on those choices of governing materials and procedures. The crux of this study began as, and remains, an inquiry into physical presence, and, by extension, the idea that Minimalist sculpture somehow returns the viewer to the viewer. At the core of any materialist position is the certainty that experience contains an element of passivity. If nothing exists but matter and its movements and modifications, then consciousness and volition depend entirely on material agency. The hierarchy of such a scheme underpins the socio-economic and cultural level with that of the biological, and, in turn, the biological with the physical. However, perception is not a matter of automatically recording external stimuli, but requires active elaboration. A hermeneutic process, therefore, is not one of unbridled pure thought; rather, it requires the recognition of an external and constant measure that gives form to thought. Recourse to the 'given' fact of an external reference, therefore, depends upon a relationship between materiality and signification-the resultant heuristic method of perceptual hypothesis that is established remains perpetually open to questioning. C.S. Peirce is invaluable to this study in providing a theoretical framework for these considerations. The manner in which modern sculpture was realized experienced a decisive change with the emergence of Minimalism. The dominant aesthetic of Vitalism was brought into question as never before by the materialist programme set in motion by Minimalism. The key issue of adherence to a Vitalist or Minimalist aesthetic is invaluable when clarifying the position of artists such as Tony Smith and Robert Smithson. Earlier sculptural forms generated by Constructivism utilized aspects of industrial mimesis but did not engage with sheer physicality to the extent that Minimalism did. One reason for this major difference was the consideration accorded to scale rather than size by the Minimalists. Such a consideration of scale and the experience of spatio-temporality, understood as inextricably part of the sculptural situation, gave rise to site-specificity and its ramifications as Minimalist concerns. Approximately the first third of this study examines Vitalism as the dominant and enduring theme and background for modern sculpture. Vitalism formed an inherited intellectual situation that was directly challenged by the materialism of the Minimalists. In the second part of the study, Barnett Newman and Constantin Brancusi provide the two central historical precedents for the re-introduction of the precinctual into contemporary sculpture. Newman's interest in place as a spatio-temporal experience, and his extension of the artwork to include the interstice between the viewer and the artwork was an extremely important step for Minimalism. Brancusi is of interest mainly for his addressing of temporality as a sculptural concern, and the relationship of material to place. 11 His early use of assemblage, as a method of drawing with materials in space, facilitated not only the Minimalists but also modern sculpture at large. A section of the study is devoted to the sculpture of Richard Serra and the idea of critical distance, something that he shares with Newman. This intellectual attitude aids Serra in his declaration of the space of sculpture as parallel to, and critical of, its context. The work of Robert Smithson is examined in the light of site-specificity and ubiety, and, in particular, his use of symbols as structural prompts. Smithson's dystopian Futurism is examined as a significant way of helping to draw the distinction between his intellectual position and that of a Vitalist. The study concludes with a consideration of contextualization in general, and of Maya Lin's site-specific memorial to the causalities of the Vietnam War. What has emerged from this study is that precinctual space was firmly re-established in contemporary sculptural practice by the Minimalist sculptors. I have used the term ubiety to describe the re-emphasis, and re-emergent awareness, of place as an interstitial space that was associated with the Minimalists. Ubiety is understood to be the condition of being in a particular place, and comes from the Latin 'where'. In contrast, ubiquity is the condition of being everywhere. In the light of ubiety, sculpture, particularly site-specific sculpture, is discussed and understood as a spatio-temporal event.

Chapter 1; The dissemination of the rhetorical subject(ivity) Through an analysis of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and de Man’s notion of prosopopeia I demonstrate how modernist discourses construct a figure [face] of/for the artist and cover up [entomb] the recalcitrance of his or her corporeal body to be the [ontological] site of meaning. Through Derrida’s notions of klang and force I investigate the ways in which the disintegration of material objects interrupt the whole process of facing the art work in this way. Derrida’s notion of hauntology is also utilised to argue that the selfidentical subject(ivity) is in fact a semiotically induced spectre. Chapter 2: Rothko, Death and Prosopopeia Again de Man’s figure of prosopopeia is explored to demonstrate how the artist Rothko is discursively posited as overcoming his own death. I argue that Rothko’s paintings ‘act’ as self-portraits and ‘figure’ his [enduring] presence. Through Derrida’s notion of the paragon [the frame] I also investigate how the propensity of the material to disintegrate ruptures the circularity of the discourse on Rothko and thereby undermines the transcendental moment proffered by his paintings. However, I also show, through an analysis of Derrida’s notion of the pharmakon, how discursive strategies keep raising the spectre of the transcendental artist to keep the fallacy of the self-identical subject(ivity) ‘alive’. Chapter 3: Michaux’s insomnia: The plenitude of the void I argue that the Mescaline drawings, made by Michaux in the 1950s, cannot be interpreted through a ‘standard’ modernist framework. In trying to construct an alternative interpretation for Michaux’s work I demonstrate how his drawings can be viewed as an attempt to articulate the excessive nature of corporeality and the impossibility of transcendence. Blanchot’s notion of insomnia is used to go beyond the polarities of the negative and the positive to the neutral and excessive zone of indeterminancy. Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the tonal and nagual, becoming-animal and Bergson’s notions of extensity and duration are also utilised to [theoretically] access this zone of indeterminacy, as that of the insomnious subject(ivity). Conclusion: Face to de-face Firstly I reiterate the claims made in chapter 2, that modernism, as a circular discourse, constantly offers the ‘presence’ of Rothko as proof of his enduring transcendentality. As a contrast I use Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of faciality to argue that Michaux tried to de-face his art, but failed. I will therefore indicate the impossibility of totally de-facing the subject(ivity) within any discursive system where the name acts as primary signifier.

This dissertation follows the theme of negation, negativity, and “practices of negation”, through a selection of writings on art in the post-war period, and, in particular, from the 1960s to the present. Although the term negation is widely used, most prominently with respect to the histories and analyses of art-historical categories like avant-gardism, neoavant-gardism, modernism, and postmodernism, very little attention has been paid to the concept itself, 01 to its role within art-historical methodology. The main art-theoretical texts which I select for examination are characterised by a suspicion of figures of identity, plenitude, or affirmation. I explore the borderlands between dialectical and nihilistic methodologies which these suspicions seem to provoke, and I argue that the attention to negativity has a particular importance for considerations of art because of its implications for the question of representation. Chapter 1 outlines the key accounts on avant-gardism and modernism, and looks at the impact of the Left Hegelian tradition on recent art theory. I argue that the claims that negativity has become compromised or ineffectual, lead, in fact, to a reassertion of negativity. The second section of this chapter tracks some of the methodological implications through a case study of the writings of T.J. Clark, and develops the question of negation as a fundamental problem of representation. Chapter 2 analyses the writings of the Italian architectural theorists/historians Manfredo Tafuri and Massimo Cacciari. These authors elaborate their arguments from German critical theory, and their attention to negativity is tracked into an account of “completed nihilism”. Chapter 3 starts from the association - advanced, in particular, by writers associated with the journal October - made between modernism/postmodernism and the rhetorical figures of symbol/allegory. I argue that allegorical negativity is not straightforwardly disjunctive, and, by reading it as a degenerative dialectic, the argument returns to representational debates.