Tactility: The Interrogation of Medium in Art of the 1960s

This article intervenes in current debate about medium by looking back to the 1960s, a moment located on the cusp between medium‐based and post‐medium conceptions of art. It examines a body of sculptural work where tactile qualities were given priority to the point where the formal values constituting sculpture as a medium were effectively negated. This situation illuminates a larger split emerging in the art world between the focus on materials and physical processes and the impulse to be liberated from the constraints of medium specificity. Such a split, it is argued, relates to divided perceptions of economy at the time when a preoccupation with the materials and processes of industrial production coexisted with a new focus on consumerism. What implications does the subsequent intensification of a consumer‐orientated economy have for understandings of the materiality of the art work in a post‐medium art world? Alex Potts is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an editor of History Workshop Journal. His recent publications include The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000), and Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994 and 2000). He is currently working on a book about the European and American art worlds in the 1950s and early 1960s.