The Line

                 

Composition 1960 #10 was one of a series of short succinct scores that Young produced in the early 1960s, several of which he published in An Anthology. Composition 1960 #10 follows Composition 1960 #9 (1960), which was a short straight line, printed on an index card. For Young, the form of the line served as the minimal unit of action, or an event, what he termed the “singular event.” The event for Young was the conceptual apparatus through which he structured activities over time and in space. The singular form of the line as event in turn expands into complex possibilities for experience, in each drawing, each following. Serving as a formal counterpart to Morris’s and De Maria’s own linear inscriptions (down the beach or along a pathway), Young’s line linked temporal process to spatial context: draw a straight line and follow it. His line is a model for a diversity of experience in a duration of time within a delineated place determined by material form —an appropriate, if minimal, example of practice inscribed in a site.

 Page 42-43
Toward Site
Jane McFadden