Shabby clique.

LAST SUMMER LUCY AND JORGE ORTA INVITED ME TO VISIT THEIR dairy farm on the outskirts of Paris, and in that oddly bucolic old-world environment I started catching up on a backlog of reading, including the inaugural issue of Continuous Project (by Bettina Funcke, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, and Joseph Logan). The issue consists of a large Xerox copy of the first issue of Avalanche magazine (1970), brimming with gallery ads and roughly edited interviews. It features many of the godfathers of Minimalism appearing, strangely enough, as a band of hippies in their mid-twenties and looking far less sophisticated than any of the current crop of art-school graduates who now hit the pages of mainstream media. The sensation of reading this reprint was somewhat analogous to discovering snapshots of your parents sharing a joint at a neighbor's long-forgotten love-in--sort of shocking and endearing at the same time.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The year 1970 fell a little after the Minimalist heyday, and the Conceptual movement had been gaining notoriety for a few years. Although these artists were not completely wet behind the ears, they still seemed fresh and formulative. In various grainy black-and-white reproductions Dan Graham, Carl Andre, and Allen Ruppersberg all appear sporting scraggly beards. The "Rumbles" column announces that twenty-seven-year-old James Turrell is collaborating with Robert Irwin and Dr. Edward Wortz on his second formal exhibition. William Wegman performs Three Speeds, Three Temperatures in the men's room at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And one of my personal favorites is the ad for Forrest "Frosty" Myers's upcoming exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery. He looks utterly bewitching in large headset earphones (that look a bit like Mouseketeer ears), a bushy Tom Selleck mustache, and a short Afro wig pulled down over shaggy brown (real) hair.

It is hard to imagine that our parents, the smart artists of the historical establishment, were not guys in nubby suits and black-framed glasses but rather a bunch of ragtag hipster nerds in cutoff shorts. All of a sudden a parallel Minimalist universe starts to unfold ...

There are two things about Minimalism and (true) Conceptualism that in my mind make them the last of the "great" art movements. The first thing that stands out about Minimal art was that it shifted the modes of perception themselves instead of inventing different technical innovations or thematic references. Somehow it managed to alter the fundamental act of reading, negotiating, and experiencing the object in space. And now since reading the 1970 Avalanche, I have a sneaking suspicion that the sources of this innovation may have been not only a reaction against the subjectivity of the Abstract Expressionists or the illusionism of spatial representation but also hallucinogenic-drug culture, grassroots political movements, and the era's newfound interest in Eastern religion, which opened new modes of experience and of reading the "self" in relationship to the greater whole.

Speaking of the self brings me to the second thing I find significant about Minimalism: It is one of the last generations of collective artistic growth. Not that all of its members were in agreement about the particular nuances--but it seems that the art world as a whole was small enough in those days to foster movements with agreed-upon goals and/or shifts in group thinking. Most movements since Minimalism have been broken into a plethora of subgenerations: neo-geo, installation art, recurring waves of painting, institutional critique, scatter art, identity politics art, video art, Internet art, design art, architecture art, crafty art. This brings to mind Terry Eagleton's book After Theory, based on the premise that no theorists are thinking about the larger life issues today. He contends that by focusing on micro-topics we have turned away from the great socialist project of collective, and have instead aligned ourselves with the nihilistic goals of a capitalism we pretend to oppose. I often feel that art has taken a similar turn and has consequently dropped into a monotonous hum of personal themes, interests, and technical specialties, which may bring commercial success but do little to inspire the larger social mechanism of art.

But back to beers, beards, and the pursuit of a new vision. I'm not sure that artists had it all figured out in those days. When you read through the interviews and essays you can often find rough spots where they seem to be formulating opinions on the spot, and some of these ideas work and others don't. But it goes further than that. The lesson that I took from 1970 Avalanche was about being smart enough to go through a dumb phase, to have an idea even though you know full well that the next generation will topple it. We are now of an era that is so well versed in critical thinking (or critical nonthinking) that we know better than to have any grand hopes or to start up any collective movements. But in the end all ideas are just that, "ideas," and sometimes even a wrong one can be a far more inspired creation than any carefully edited position.

Andrea Zittel lives and works in New York and California. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.