With the riseof American minimalism,the radically reductive art of themid-1960's that took to a logical conclusion of the Greenbergian doctrine that painting tended inexorably to approach the condition of absolute flatness,and sculpture that of volumetric clarity,one saw formalism at its most ruthless absolute,and,artistically,one sawacomplete dead end .Thus my criticism is a double critique of Greenberg's theory of modernist painting and of Minimalism's Greenbergian advocacy of literalism .