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Postminimalism was ushered in by a show titled Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard in the fall of 1966. She decided to organize the show because the rigors of minimalism, of which she had been an early champion, had made her aware of what was precluded, namely "any aberrations toward the exotic." She also recognized that a significant number of artists had "evolved a . . . style that has a good deal in common with the primary [or minimal] structure as well as, surprisingly, with aspects of Surrealism.

Eccentric abstractions were composed of unexpected, often soft materials, arranged in modular or serial structures. The funky materials seemed to refer to the artist's private, frequently erotic experiences. Indeed, eccentric abstraction was also aptly characterized as minimalism with an eccentric, Dada, surrealist, or expressionist edge; or as purist funk; or as sexy, absurdist, or perverse minimalism. On the day of the opening of Lippard's show, and in the same building, there also opened an exhibition of minimal art organized by Ad Reinhardt, with the help of Robert Smithson. Robert Pincus-Witten commented that these two shows "represented the apogee of Minimalism and the beginning of 'post' or 'counter' Minimalism." Lippard soon came to believe that the eccentric abstractionists were intent on the dissolution of the minimal object, as she and John Chandler wrote in a 1968 article titled "The Dematerialization of Art", which was also the subject of a book of hers published in 1973.

Robert Morris, an originator of minimal sculpture, chronicled the transition-in-progress from minimalism to postminimalism. Like Lippard, he had written extensively on minimal art, his "Notes on Sculpture" providing the theoretical underpinning of the "unitary object," as he termed it. But he had turned against the aesthetic of minimal sculpture in two articles, "Anti-Form" (1968) and "Beyond Objects" (1969), in which he formulated a rationale for the postminimal tendency labeled process art.

Morris had come to believe that minimal sculpture was not as physical as art could or should be because the formation and arrangement of its rigid modular or serial units was not inherent in their material. To make a work more physical, the process of the works's "making itself' had to be emphasized. Morris called for a literal art whose focus was on matter -- more specifically, on malleable materials -- and the action of gravity on matter. Such an art, whose ordering was "casual and imprecise and unemphasized," could not be predetermined. "Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material." To demonstrate what process art was, Morris Organized 9 in a Warehouse at the beginning of 1969. He included not only Americans -- Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman -- but also Europeans -- the Italian arte povera artists Giovanni Anselmo and Gilberto Zorio (and he should have invited Joseph Beuys) -- indicating the international character of the new three-dimensional art.

In the essay "Beyond Objects", published soon after 9 in a Warehouse, Morris asserted that the unitary object, like any object, was connected to its surroundings in a kind of figure-ground relationship. To Morris the equation of the object with the figure revealed that minimal sculpture was "terminally diseased." The cure was to base three-dimensional art on "the conditions of the visual field itself." The discrete, homogeneous object had to be replaced by "accumulations of things or stuff, sometimes very heterogenous. . . . In another era, one might have said that the difference was between a figurative and a landscape mode." Morris treated process art in formal terms, but viewed from another perspective, sculpture made of inchoate, mutable "stuff" had an unconventional edge, exemplifying a countercultural attitude to art. . .

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