The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, by Martha Buskirk, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2003; 317 pages, $39.95 cloth.

Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, by Suzaan Boettger, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002; 316 pages, $50.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In the wake of Minimalism [see article beginning on p. 90], painting and traditional kinds of sculpture went on the defensive, as new varieties of art multiplied with astonishing energy. Suddenly the scene included Process art, performance art, earthworks, video art, mail art, Conceptual art and much more. This proliferation continues, as Martha Buskirk argues in The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. After discussing Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci and other concept-oriented performance artists of the late 1960s and early '70s, she shows how the genre evolved in the work of artists like Ana Mendieta, Janine Antoni and Mona Hatoum, whose mixtures of performance, process and installation elaborate possibilities opened up three decades ago. Buskirk traces a parallel pattern of development from Pop art to the conceptually flavored image-borrowings of such appropriation artists as Sherrie Levine and Jeff Koons.

According to Buskirk, Minimalist installations transformed gallery space from a setting for art to an art medium. One might suggest that Happenings and, earlier, Surrealist mise-en-scenes achieved comparable transformations. Nonetheless, there is a certain plausibility to Buskirk's argument that Minimalism provided the crucial models for installations by such contemporaries as Fred Wilson and Mark Dion. It's not that these artists are direct heirs of Minimalism. Rather, the Minimalist approach to gallery space, which incorporates the means of exhibition into the meaning of the art on view, has become standard at the expense of other approaches. So it seems likely that most current ideas about installation come, at least indirectly, from Minimalist precedents. Minimalism is also an important source of the idea that one needs no exceptional manual skills to be an artist.

Of course, Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel was the first work of art to dispense entirely with the long-nurtured talents and techniques of the studio. Buskirk follows Thierry de Duve in arguing that the acceptance of Readymades brought with it a redefinition of the artist. No longer seen as a practitioner of certain specialized techniques, the artist was now someone in command of "art in general"--a vague concept borrowed from de Duve. It seems to refer to an essence of sorts: pure art or the esthetic process in itself, above and beyond anything as particular as painting or the other mediums. Though Bicycle Wheel appeared in 1913, Buskirk contends that the implications of the Readymade were not fully exploited until the 1960s, when the Minimalists used industrial methods of fabrication to produce cubes and other simple forms.

I agree, though Buskirk's argument is hard to follow unless one acknowledges at least a family resemblance between readymade objects (Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel), readymade images (Jasper Johns's Flag works) and preconceived forms (Minimalist cubes and grids). To put it another way: the form of a cube is so anonymous, so easily and frequently conceived, that it counts, metaphorically, as a kind of readymade. Though the metaphor may be dubious, it appears that some artists and critics in the late 1960s saw the simpler Minimalist objects as completing a transition from readymade object to readymade image to readymade (or preconceived) form. From the end of that sequence it was a short step to Conceptual art and the Duvian idea of "art in general."

Because concepts are easy to elaborate, art now constitutes an ever-expanding field--boundless, perhaps, but filled with stable landmarks. Buskirk charts the conceptual terrain with confidence. The Contingent Object is an impressive guide to what have become known as art issues. Suzaan Boettger's Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, reissued this year in paperback, deserves equal praise for somewhat different reasons.

Concentrating on earthworks--just one of the possibilities opened up by Minimalism--Boettger adopts a purview that is narrower than Buskirk's. Yet it feels larger--in part, no doubt, because of the way the early earthworks sprawled in the immensities of the Western desert. She also has an expansive sense of context. Though earthworks can be tied plausibly enough to Minimalist precedents, Boettger begins her story with an account of the late-'60s trend that lured all sorts of art out of the gallery and into public space.

In 1967, Boettger recalls, the curator Sam Green organized "Sculpture in the Environment," which placed large works by Alexander Calder, David Smith, Charles Ginnever and many others on prominent sites around Manhattan. She mentions particularly Claes Oldenburg's Placid Civic Monument, a temporary trench he had dug by professional gravediggers in Central Park [see A.i.A., Jan. '01], as well as other outdoor pieces executed that year in Europe by Jan Dibbers and Richard Long. Boettger notes further that in 1967 Green preceded "Sculpture in the Environment" with "Art for the City," a show of open-air sculpture in Philadelphia. She then links all this outdoorsiness to the soil and other natural materials favored by the practitioners of Arte Povera.

Boettger is fascinated by the nuts and bolts of patronage, public and private, and she likes to make large cultural connections. The success of new art by young artists of the '60s, she says, was bolstered by the decade's preoccupation with youth culture. When she delves into formal genealogy, she maintains this wide focus. Floor sculpture by Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt showed the way to Robert Smithson's Nonsites and to the earthworks that he and others mapped onto the ground--or so Boettger credibly argues. She gives her case its breadth by quoting from contemporary criticism, by pointing to precedents (Giacometti's horizontal works from the 1930s) and, as always, by telling fascinating tales of artists interacting with dealers and patrons.

Boettger traces the paths of Smithson, Michael Heizer and a generation of earthworkers out of the gallery, into the Western wilderness and onward to "the park," her generic name for the sort of site that began to interest these artists as the 1970s got under way. Here she invokes Central Park, which was designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead, the 19th-century landscape architects Smithson praised in one of his last essays. And she alludes as well to Battery Park City, at the foot of Manhattan, where Mary Miss installed a huge untitled piece in 1973. Boettger has given us the best account of earthworks so far. Yet her book has a limitation--a severe one, which it shares with Buskirk's Contingent Object.

These books describe much--in minute, lively and useful detail--but they interpret very little. Both writers accept their' themes "readymade," in the shapes stamped out by the machinery of expertise: critical, historical and curatorial. In defense of Boettger and Buskirk, one might note that they augment their descriptions of artworks with quotations from the artists' statements. Yet we can't expect artists to tell us what their art means. Nor should we ignore what they say. As Buskirk remarks, nearly anything can be defined as art, and that, I think, is why work in a new mode or medium is nearly always accompanied by a statement designed to help make it eligible for art-world attention. When this verbal accompaniment is present, it should be understood as part of the work. But, like nearly all other art writers, Boettger and Buskirk take the artist's statement as an external, axiomatic truth about the work in question, not as an element of the work--one that, like all its other elements, needs to be interpreted. Though description is detailed--and, in Boettger's book, amplified by lots of interesting anecdotes--interpretation never begins.

We understand some works of art as derivative, others as original--or we do if we attend to our experience. If we attend instead to artists' formulations of art issues, and take those formulations as axiomatic, we will follow Buskirk to the conclusion that Sherrie Levine's appropriations cant out an "assault on originality." It is one thing to repeat without question a standard statement of an art issue. It is another to say how Levine's fairly original attempt to come across as unoriginal counts as an assault on anything.