Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture, April 27 - June 12, 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York, was organized by the museum's Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Kynaston McShine. This exhibit was a critical and media success as reported in Time[1] and Newsweek[2], presenting the public with a show dedicated to a "New Art". This art has been given many titles including ABC art, Reductive art and most popularly, Minimalism[3]. The labels have been roundly rejected by its practitioners, notably Donald Judd, but the techniques applied by the participating artists not only introduced stripped-down forms, but also presented new materials with smooth, shiny surfaces and the concept of artist as "designer", not necessarily "maker". During a forum conducted at the museum, Kynaston McShine, Barbara Rose, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Mark di Suvero discussed the "New Sculpture". di Suvero famously remarked, "Primary Structures is the key show of the 1960s...", and also, "...my friend Donald Judd cannot qualify as an artist because he doesn't do the work", to which Judd replied, "...The point is not whether one makes the work or not... I don't see... why one technique is any more essentially art than another..."[4] It can be argued that this show ushered in a radical new way of presenting ideas and space that did not rely on the artist's hand yet rather on the final result.
The exhibit did have its detractors as McShine, in an effort to broaden appeal and show a wide variety of artists working in this form, included a West coast contingent and most of the British artists from the "New Generation" show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery from 1965. It appeared that Primary Structures was to be formulated around Anthony Caro's former St. Martin's students and the American group led by a relatively unknown elder statesman, Tony Smith.
In 1989, a major expansion and renovation project was undertaken at the museum. Upon completion in June 1993, the layout of the Primary Structures show was history and only a few installation shots of the show remain to record the exhibit and the old galleries. Some of McShine's Primary Structures galleries were considered very powerful (Gallery 5) while others seemed to contain "leftovers" (Gallery 10).
This exhibit will be remembered as a turning point in contemporary sculpture and for McShine's foresight by including artists that turned out to be successful provocateurs as artists, teachers and writers.
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