Jo Applin’s Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America argues for a more pluralistic take on American sculpture in the 1960s than the established dominant narrative figured in historical overviews such as Passages in Modern Sculpture by Rosalind Krauss (New York: Viking Press, 1977) or The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist by Alex Potts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), which privileges Minimalism. At the moment of this writing when mainstream contemporary art discourse seems to love Minimal art more than ever (James Turrell recently filled the Guggenheim rotunda while Carl Andre graced the cover of Artforum), Applin’s book serves as a welcome reminder that it was not all hard-edged boxes and phenomenology in New York studios and galleries, the center of the art world, during the early 1960s, but also aggressive reliefs, hyper-anthropomorphic transitional objects, spiky treasure chests, totems that longed for a personal voice but settled for bricolage, and irreverent, ambivalent homages to sculptural elders. Applin shows that such sculptures by Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, H. C. Westermann, and Bruce Nauman were in fact discussed (“hiding in plain sight” (6)) in the very texts by Donald Judd and Lucy Lippard that art historians have used to substantiate Minimal art’s prominence. In fact, Judd’s criticism functions as Applin’s intellectual touchstone, his wide-ranging embrace of sculpture in his milieu proving him to be a Minimalist of a different color.

The 1960s emerge in Eccentric Objects as the period of postwar recovery and possibility and negation and change that we know those years to have been, but with new examples, new categories and “reference points” to use “to map the terrain of sixties art production” (11). What those examples mean for the sixties, or how the particular array of diversity Applin maps is historically significant, and not just the messy tangle of difference and variability that characterizes any decade of any history anywhere, is subtly suggested through the composition of each chapter more than directly specified in the book’s introduction or conclusion. Applin explains that her focus is “how objects have the potential to reconfigure subjectivity” (83), more than how they speak to their objective historical conditions. She justifies this methodological decision with Judd’s own position: “The history of art and art’s condition at any one time are pretty messy. They should stay that way” (3). Anyone who has ever tried to write history can only sympathize with this view, but there is nevertheless something about a book’s form, less disjointed than the series of reviews and articles through which Judd’s intellectual work went forward, that sends one looking for patterns, if not totalizing structures; and since several themes do recur during the course of Applin’s meticulous research and incisive theoretical pairings, one cannot resist risking neatness against Judd’s messiness to track them for the sake of the broader historical insights they might yield.

The book’s five case studies offer a range of familiarity levels. From Oldenburg as the biggest star from the canon, to Nauman and Bontecou (both of whose works from the 1960s have received attention from major museums in recent years), to Samaras and Westermann (known more for being art community personalities or “artist’s artists,” but whose sculptures have received less rigorous attention in books of art history). The chapters on the last two artists have a vitality born of their freshness and of the field’s need for them that make them the strongest chapters in the book.

The crux of Applin’s chapter on Bontecou is a formal insight Judd articulated in 1965 that Bontecou’s work is simultaneously “specific,” its everyday industrial materials presenting themselves quite literally as such, and metaphorical, evocative of bodily orifices simultaneously threatening and erotic. Applin is interested in the way both types of reading emerge from the work’s abstraction, always centered around an empty void, finally arguing that the literalness makes the imagined fantasy of the vagina dentata more threateningly present, resulting in a confusing aggression toward the viewing subject that is characteristic of sculptural practice in the 1960s. What it meant for a viewer to be “complicit” (41) with an object so “disturbing of the boundaries” (40) that once existed between subject and object in the space of sculpture is indirectly answered by the chapter’s discussion of the artist’s unambivalent anger about war and through helpful period references to Melanie Klein on the part-object and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the collapse between subject and object in dark spaces.

Applin’s second chapter deftly brings together the various existing readings of Oldenburg’s soft sculptures from the 1960s (by Judd, Max Kozloff, Barbara Rose, and others) before arriving at her own in a compact but comprehensive essay that will be extremely valuable for undergraduate teaching. She convincingly argues for a reading of the hamburgers and mixers as transitional objects, as per D. W. Winnicott: those things such as stuffed animals that children both physically love and aggress against as they work out a proper way to have a full range of feelings and get along well with others at the same time. In this regard his sculptures were bad Pop objects, undeniably recognizable as consumer goods, but in their “abstract references to bodies” (48) giving away more than they were supposed to about the erotics governing everyday relations to them, opening up “boundaries between reality and fantasy” (61) in a way that “exceeded [their] representation of commodity culture” (48). Applin’s analysis suggests that Oldenburg’s sixties were a world in which people related to each other as objects, but that they might at least be more aware of such relations’ psychic complexities.

The chapter on Samaras seems to get to the heart of the book’s project in certain ways, though to say so is to mobilize a set of terms that, based on Applin’s argument here, the author might reject. Via vibrant description, she examines Samaras’s series of Boxes with piles of things covering and coming out of them in “peculiar” and “threatening” ways (69), as Judd phrased it. Important to their dialogue with Minimalism is the fact that each is open, revealing its elaborate interior contents, and yet—like a “tomb” or a “protected secret” (82)—“there remains a sense that the viewer is always missing something . . . which may be hidden in a corner or under the lid, blocked from view by the busy and clustered surfaces” (72–73). If Minimalism had given form to the new brand of sixties cool by warding off expression with a blank exterior and—when revealed at all—an empty interior, Samaras explored other solutions in a model of subjectivity that jockeyed between dazzlingly “impenetrable surface” and exposed but inscrutable depths, resting assured that its defenses would be maintained on either level (83). Inspired by Robert Smithson, Applin bolsters this chapter with a comparison of the Boxes with works by Eva Hesse, a fan of Samaras, but next to whom he pales slightly. Hesse lovingly and respectfully borrowed some of Samaras’s best structural ideas about inside and outside, but did him one better insofar as her version more readily leaves behind the realm of surrealist disagreeable décor (Judd, Applin tells, kept his own Box #4 (1962) by the bed), entering into a more broadly reaching realm of abstraction, vulnerable and demanding—one that Applin sets up the reader to notice in her discussions of Bontecou and Oldenburg.

Eccentric Objects veers away from questions of abstraction in chapter 4 to devote respectful attention to Westermann’s carefully crafted, personally coded, persistently figurative sculptures, mobilizing various critical voices to reconstruct a period view of an “arcane” (Max Kozloff, 93) art of “jokes or statements that the viewer cannot fully grasp” (Stacy Moss, 107), the evasiveness of which resonates with her argument about Samaras. Applin does not avoid the biographical details that are usually called upon to account for Westermann’s work: his traumatic years as a sailor in World War II and in Korea, art school on the G.I. Bill, his long and happy second marriage, the couple’s retreat to the Connecticut countryside. She thus places firmly in the background of her multi-layered analysis the sense of a creative life full of meaningful labor that many Americans were able to persevere in having despite the ruthless rise of spectacular consumer culture in the cities. But biographical research is only one facet of her method, which aims “to offer a conceptual reading . . . that complements . . . more iconographical interpretations” (101). Her conceptual focus is Westermann’s technique, which combined fine craftsmanship with postmodern bricolage, deploying “corny and romantic clichés” (90) and obsessive attention to detail in a language that allowed him to give form to horrific wartime nightmares while avoiding the personal self-exposure that would have resulted from a less citational style. Westermann provides Applin’s collection of case studies with another model of subjectivity, differently defensive, situated between Abstract Expressionism’s “Modern Man” discourse and Minimalism’s “refusal of ‘self’” (97).

In the fifth and final study of the book, Applin returns to the theme of “abstractly figuring the body in formal terms” (113), but rather than focusing on the articulation of a defensive subjectivity—an established and uncontroversial argument about Nauman’s work—she portrays the profoundly relational nature of a series of sculptures Nauman made in 1966 and 1967, whose titles refer directly to Westermann and Henry Moore. Thus the Nauman chapter offers an opportunity to consider Westermann again through a younger artist’s eyes, thoroughly mythologized by his culture as a “cultish Dada carpenter” (132), and as he appeared next to Moore, “the establishment dinosaur steeped in a humanist tradition” (132). Works such as Westermann’s Ear (1967) and Seated Storage Capsule for Henry Moore (1966) function as prankish homages to two decidedly masculine forefathers in which questions of inherited content and technique are minimized (Westermann) or bracketed for later (Moore) in favor of considering what would be required for inheritance to go forward at all. Applin writes poetically of what is involved in “one artist listening to another, or being heard” (123), finding in Harold Bloom’s notion of “mishearing” support for the idea that Nauman’s work—somewhat surprisingly now that the book has turned its attention to an artist who does “fit” (114) into the category of Minimalism—offers “something that is closer to the truth,” and in its partiality, the potential to “cut through to a deeper meaning” (126). Such a view is consistent with Applin’s keen appreciation for what sculptural abstraction made possible in the 1960s, but unlike Nauman, who was ambivalent about the body, letting it anxiously drop out of his representations of Moore (133), Applin consistently grounds her analysis in embodied description. Thus when in the penultimate paragraph of the chapter she quotes Gene Swensen on the need in 1966 to find “intellectual rather than formal ways of dealing with” (134) contemporary art, I found myself wondering if Applin’s text might be signaling the present critical moment’s distance from Swensen’s by deploying a method in which the intellectual, the formal, and the sensuous proceed together. Let art history follow the model she sets rather than the guarded ones she describes.