Rasheed Araeen's 1970 Minimalist Structure 8bS Reexamined in Art Historical Context

Rasheed Araeen's work 8bS was featured in the group exhibition Manufactured Art in May 1970, focusing on art that engaged with industrial processes and advanced technology. Araeen, trained as a civil engineer, created lattice-like structures during the 1960s and 1970s that utilized forms from his professional background. His piece employed productive techniques to shape artistic form, diverging from formalist modernism's compositional principles and moving beyond objecthood. Unlike Minimalist objects, which often mimicked technological infrastructure negatively, Araeen's structures avoided such limitations and anticipated later artistic moves by figures like Robert Morris. Revisiting this contribution highlights the significance of Araeen's structuralist approach while positioning US Minimalism as just one of multiple paths emerging from modernist objecthood's stagnation. The analysis appears in ARTMargins Volume 12, Issue 3, pages 30-53, published by MIT Press with a DOI of 10.1162/artm_a_00362, and is accessible via subscription only. Kylie Gilchrist authored the article, which was published on October 1, 2023.