Following is an excerpt from a new essay on the art of Brenda Miller by Lucy Lippard.
Brenda Miller: At Second Sight
Lucy R. Lippard
Brenda Miller arrived at her ways and means of making art some fifty years ago. Her consistently impressive work has aged well because its sensuous affect was never corralled by minimalist generalizations. Unlike the rejective canon “what you see is what you get,” Miller’s work offers more than what you get at first sight. The viewer may sense underlying suggestions of feminist content and imagery or simply enjoy its visual power. Offbeat minimalism—or what I called in a 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction—could extend from Eva Hesse’s sculptural and material innovations as far as Robert Ryman, whose painted variations on white seemed endless and painterly rather than “reductive.” I dislike the terms “post-minimalist” (tethered as it is to a predominantly male style effectively meandered by Miller and other feminist artists), and of course post-feminist (premature until and if we reach post-patriarchy).
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