a public, serialized version of the everyday. Hyperrealist art, coming after minimalism and pop, also displays a concern with the phenomenology of the everyday, providing a visual analogue for the role of description in the Nouveau roman. [9] As Estes' intermediate photographs prove, appearances disallow a priori knowledge: «Perhaps the more you show the way things look the less you show how they are or how we think they are.» [10] Apparently subscribing to the modernist decree of simplification and evacuation of content, minimal art actually proposes one of the most radical alternatives to modernism, challenging the instantaneity of apprehension that for Greenberg or Michael Fried defines the presentness of art as an escape from duration—as ‹pure› opticality. Indeed, in «Art and Objecthood» (1967), Fried fiercely attacks the ‹theatrical,› experiential dimension of minimal art, and rejects some of that art's defining traits—duration, spatial relations, and attention to the role of the beholder.

Instead of an «abstract spectatordom,» minimalism proposes an experience exercised by a subject whose «corporeal density both guaranteed and was made

possible by the interconnectedness of all its sensory fields…» [11] In the works of minimalists Donald Judd and Robert Morris, [12] both the «unitary form»—the form without internal configuration—and seriality push viewers to confront their concept of what a form is like. [13] As Morris puts it, «The constant shape of the cube held in the mind but which the viewer never literally experiences, is an actuality against which the literal changing, perspective views are related.» [14] The Consciousness of the Corporality of the Viewer Part of the significance of Akerman's bodily metaphor of the flesh and the skeleton is to suggest that the «body-in-general» addressed by the minimalists in the 1960s is, as Rosalind Krauss argues, the same body that is particularized in art of the '70s and '80s.

A clear example of how the spectator's awareness of his or her own physicality may be eventually linked to a politicized aesthetics is exemplified in Akerman's and Yvonne Rainer's cinema. «Je tu il elle»(1974) makes clear Akerman's debt to minimalist principles of cumulative seriality. She exhausts a conjugation of positions for herself and her prop, a mattress. She adheres to Yvonne Rainer's move towards a more