Keywords

• In 1962 George Kubler published The Shape of Time: Remarks on History of Things that shortly after the Minimalists will consider a necessary precedent of their own reflections. According to Kubler art history
• as the more general history of things
• develops following "formal sequences" centered on the obviousness of a given problem whose solution is provided by the different works included in the series. Kubler's other thesis took into account the sequence as a transmission of signals based on the feedback
• according to which the last object of the series is induced by a latent aspect in the prime object. The analysis of his study reveals both scientific &ndash
• the theory of the information &ndash
• and artistic &ndash
• the modernism of Clement Greenberg &ndash
• needs which had developed in the previous decade. In Modernist Painting (1961)
• Greenberg explains the development of art in the serial progression
• from Manet to Rothko
• where the specific characteristic of flatness strongly emerges in painting. Even the artists of the fifties and their followers work in series. In particular the paintings in series by Albers
• Dubuffet
• Johns and Stella
• housed in three exhibitions held in New York in December 1959
• might have inspired Kubler
• working at that time on the book. At the same time
• Kubler's radical change in emphasis from the artist to the manufacturing technologies
• whose diversification implies different series of production of work art
• is related to the coeval decline of individualism of the abstract expressionists and to the rise
• between 1960 and 1962
• of a serial mechanization in the works of the Pop Art artists
• Lichtenstein and Warhol. Kubler's reflections on the history of things appear rather outdated after mid seventies when the idea and the project gain a pivotal role in the artistic researches
• in tune with the systemic logic of the set theory and of information technology