1968 juxtaposed calm minimalist art against unprecedented political violence

Evidence

Was ever a year more divided against itself? On one hand, the stringent Apollonian grandeur of Wavelength, Angel Face, and Donald Judd at the Whitney, not to mention The Mind Is a Muscle and Bob Dylan’s pared down new LP, John Wesley Harding—self-contained, indifferent to tumult. On the other, the insanity, political and otherwise, of 1968: Johnson’s abdication, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., university turmoil at Columbia and in Paris, the second Kennedy assassination, the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Tlatelolco massacre of Mexican students, and the third-party presidential candidacy of white supremacist George Wallace. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1150

Categorization

• SEED: The Apollonian minimalism vs. political chaos of 1968 maps onto reader’s broader claim that cultural scenes arise from specific material conditions — the contrast is a ready-made angle for an essay on art’s relation to its political moment.