The second of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode we talk about Hal Foster’s ‘An Art of Missing Parts’ from 2000 where he writes about Robert Gober’s sculptures as dioramas and primal images. The text is an explicitly Freudian, psychoanalytic reading of Gober’s work and Matt and Andrea have different views on how appropriate that is. Because of the theatrical nature of dioramas, Matt and Andrea also speak about Michael Fried’s famous (and famously derided) critique of Minimalism, ‘Art and Objecthood’ from 1967.
Below are the two texts we looked at for this podcast, with links to download a PDF of each text.
Foster, Hal. ‘An Art of Missing Parts’. October, no. 92 (2000). Download PDF.
Fried, Michael. ‘Art and Objecthood’. In Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 322-384. Malden, Massachusetts, Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Download PDF.