CHARLIE PARSONS

A Meaningful Point of View on Anne Truitt's Floor Works

Sandcastle (1963) and Remembered Sea (1974), as two unconventionally shaped, mostly horizontal floor works within Anne Truitt's wider production of mostly vertical forms demonstrate Truitt's development in the same line of thinking over a 10 year period. Both works thematize an internal division between the artwork's literal status as an object and the artwork's conventionally secured status as pictorial, a picture of something, or more than its material facts. I argue both works dramatize this distinction as an internal contradictio and propose the active inhabitance of suggested standpoints to resolve the image. I also assert this drama of literal and pictorial corresponds to a drama of separateness and continuity, both within the self and between the self and others that is fundamental to the act of expression.

I plan to make my argument first by introducing precedent for Truitt's interest in standpoints in her contemporary works of the 1970s. Then by establishing Truitt's relationship to medium conventions, I hope to draw a contrast between modernist and minimalist relationships to medium conventions, situating Truitt on the modernist side. Finally, I plan to compare the unfolding tension between Sandcastle and Remembered Sea's pictorial and literal qualities to the competing sense of continuity and separateness that underscores human action and artistic production. This gives the floor pieces a self-reflexive quality. They are about their own making, and they resolve a contradiction between separateness and continuity inherent to their making by suggesting a viewpoint which shows how both aspects form the whole of the artwork.