Smithson focused his short but influential career on a reconsideration of sculpture in relation to nature. Deeply informed by science in its popularized forms—such as science fiction literature and cinema, encyclopedic collections, and natural history museums—his practice addresses processes of accumulation, displacement, and entropy in order to reveal the contradictions in our visible world. Created for a 1969 exhibition on Loveladies Island NJ, the work seen here depicts the imaginary continent of Atlantis, a nonsite not unlike the others included in the exhibition. The sculpture was fabricated on a sandy shoreline using clear broken glass; when struck by the sun, the work dissolved into radiated shards of light, blinding the viewer in the process.

While championing self-consciously amateurish “bad” painting, Oehlen continues to infuse expressive gesture with Surrealist attitude, openly disparaging the quest for reliable form and stable meaning. Oehlen employs acrylic, spray paint, charcoal, and patterned fabric to interpret and transform John Graham’s painting Tramonto Spaventoso (Terrifying Sunset) (1940–49), a work by the Russian-born American modernist painter that he discovered in the 1990s and has been fascinated with ever since. Using Graham’s puzzle-like painting as a vehicle for repeated interpretation, Oehlen reconfigures elements in diverse and absurdist ways across multiple compositions. The exhibition, which goes by the same title, is therefore in part an homage to the earlier, lesser-known artist.

The print is based on an installation created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, but not by John Baldessari’s hand. “As there wasn’t enough money for me to travel to Nova Scotia, I proposed that the students voluntarily write ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’ on the walls of the gallery, like punishment. To my surprise they covered the walls.” Those same students made this print, but Baldessari wasn’t at the workshop when the print was made. In both cases, Baldessari gave scant instructions to the students from thousands of miles away, and he was not present to supervise, raising questions of authorship and the role of the artist.

Each of the works in this series is composed of 120 bricks stacked two high and placed directly on the gallery floor. Although the eight works in the series are precise equivalents in many respects (for example, in height, volume, and weight), each is unique in its configuration. Equivalent V is five brick lengths long and twelve brick widths wide, while Equivalent VIII measures ten brick lengths by six brick widths, and so on. By distinctly articulating the shape of each work and executing various permutations with the same materials, Andre proposed that sculpture should define rather than simply occupy space, an idea that has remained important to him throughout his career. The Equivalents, Andre’s first flat floor works, dispense with the traditional sculptural pedestal and therefore also eliminate the division between artistic and ordinary space that it implies. The viewer and the sculpture exist in the same field, a fact heightened by the artist’s decision to use unexceptional, factory-made bricks rather than a material associated with fine art, such as bronze or marble.

This is the first of thirty–nine "monuments" to the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) that Flavin created between 1964 and 1990. The stepped arrangement of white fluorescent tubes evokes Tatlin’s colossal Monument to the Third International (1920), a soaring tower intended to support Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda. Tatlin's ambitious but unrealized project to unite art and technology was of particular interest to Flavin. Although the utopian goals of the Russian Constructivists were never fulfilled, their art and philosophy were of great interest to artists of the 1960s.

Judd once wrote, “The main virtue of geometric shapes is that they aren't organic, as all art otherwise is.” Untitled is made of rectangular metal boxes: a simple geometric form the artist favored because he felt it carried no symbolic meaning. The spaces between the units are equal to each unit’s height. Depending on the height of the ceiling where the work is displayed, the number of units may be adjusted. By using a predetermined system, Judd circumvented the spontaneous decisions artists often face during the art-making process. Like many of his peers, he used new industrial materials and fabrication processes.

Characterized by their large scale and concentrated materiality, the six Cage paintings (2006) are constructed from intersecting lines, fields, and swaths of color applied with a broad squeegee. By varying the force with which he dragged this tool across the canvas, Richter added and, crucially, removed areas of paint to generate a highly unpredictable surface. The paintings are titled after influential composer, artist, and philosopher John Cage (1912–1992), whose music Richter was listening to when he produced the series. Cage’s pursuit of indeterminacy in music, reflected in his use of the I Ching and other chance operations as compositional tools, has always resonated with Richter, who has compared his own process to the act of arranging musical notes into a score.

In the Today series, the date on which the painting is made – always completed on the day it is begun - is inscribed at the center of each canvas and is the sole subject of the work. This is work classified only by a series of numbers, differentiated simply through format and color, the date, and the language of the country in which it was made. The originality of each work, its small difference from the others, becomes a possibility for a confrontation with the daily events of the world. Since its meaning is not predetermined, the real work of the piece lies ahead, in the encounter with the viewer, when it is exposed to the world. The vision it offers us is a moment in world history, yet it is an unnamed moment. It’s meaning remains to be seen it remains to be spoken. It remains to be inhabited. It becomes a sign, and its enigmatic presence offers a horizon of the consciousness to be occupied and interpreted by the viewer.

A sandy spill of a sculpture, pierced by 20,000 reed-like steel rods—means understanding the values of Ufan and the Mono-ha movement he pioneered. Active from 1968-74, the loosely affiliated Mono-ha artists set basic materials (manmade and natural) in opposition to one another, in order to derive order and chaos. The site-responsive ethos of the work aimed to show, as Ufan says, the world “as-it-is”

This work by Frankenthaler is a primordial desertscape rendered in oil paint, sand, plaster and coffee grounds. A tumult of whisks and whooshes form a singular but unnameable shape with the mystical unity of a windstorm. It’s like seeing the face of God in a column of smoke. If you were to divide it, however, you might see, to the left, Don Quixote mounted on a lion with ram’s horns, holding onto a black, turquoise and sand-colored pommel, and on the right, a cluster of overlapping grapes carved out of plaster adjoining a dried-blood splotch partially enclosed by an ear-shaped ocher line beneath a sandy dark chair speckled with coffee. None of it makes sense, but some strange alchemy enlists even the spontaneous dabs of ocher and turquoise, or the tentative little black marks, into the same overriding purpose—unless the alchemy is operating in the other direction, and it’s spontaneity itself that is the effect.

Joseph Kosuth represents one chair three ways: as a manufactured chair, as a photograph, and as a copy of a dictionary entry for the word “chair.” The installation is thus composed of an object, an image, and words. Kosuth didn’t make the chair, take the photograph, or write the definition; he selected and assembled them together. But is this art? And which representation of the chair is most “accurate”? These open-ended questions are exactly what Kosuth wanted us to think about when he said that “art is making meaning.” By assembling these three alternative representations, Kosuth turns a simple wooden chair into an object of debate and even consternation, a platform for exploring new meanings.