Sarah Lowndes

Robert Morris’s mandate for the development of sculpture ‘Notes on Sculpture: Part I and II’ (1966)8 and Michael Fried’s famous counter-attack ‘Art & Objecthood’ (1967), are so well-known

except to make the point that the qualities that Fried identified as so problematic in the work of Morris and Judd (site-
specificity, temporality, ‘theatricality’) are precisely those that have shaped what might be called the performative

Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to

The ‘now-ness’
of performance art endowed it with an oppositional edge11 that reflected the mood of a wider youth culture pre-occupied not with history and traditions, but with the here and now

Meanwhile in London, Keith Rowe had left behind the jazz he had

begun his career playing, in order to expand into free jazz and free improvisation, and to experiment with methods such as ceasing to tune his guitar. Rowe developed various prepared guitar techniques: placing the guitar flat on a table and manipulating the strings, body and pickups in unorthodox ways.

As Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle point out in the introduction to their American counterculture reader Imagine Nation, ‘The countercultural mode reveled in tangents, metaphors, unresolved contradictions, conscious ruptures of thought; it was expressly anti-linear, anti-teleological, rooted in the present, disdainful of thought processes that were circumscribed by causation and consequence’.12

begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art what is to be had from the work is located strictly within it, the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder’.9

London, Thompson quickly became part of an interdisciplinary situation, where he collaborated with the conceptual art group Art & Language, produced a number of important records for Rough Trade Records from 1978 onwards, and reformed The Red Krayola with new members from the bands he was working with such as Gina Birch from The Raincoats and Lora Logic of X-Ray Spex

Dieter Roth arrived into when he left Iceland to live in the USA from 1964–7, where he taught at Yale and elsewhere, and began making pictures and objects incorporating chocolate, cheese and other edible materials subject to decomposition.