“The Minimalists’ domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric was breached in this country in the 1960s, a decade of brutal displays of power by both American military in Vietnam and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country. Corporate power burgeoned the US in the 1960s too, with a rise of the ‘multinationals,’ due in part to the flourishing of the military-industrial complex. The exceptionally visible violence of the state’s military and disciplinary establishments in this period met with a concerted response, of course. Vested power became embattled on every front with the eruption of the civil rights, alongside the feminist and gay rights movements. In keeping with the time-honored alignments of the avant-garde, the Minimalists were self-identified, but not especially clear-thinking leftists. ‘My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalyzed politics of my life. Matter as matter rather than matter as symbol is a conscious political position, I think essentially Marxist.” […] “Now, as in the 1960s, the dominant accounts of Minimalism do not portray it as an instrument of social change but, on the contrary, as art that somehow generated and occupied a special sphere, aloof from politics and commerce and above personal feeling.” –Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power.” 1990.