“As I came of age, earth was visited yet again in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. . . . These aliens were neither monsters of organic mutation nor totalitarian robots, neither vegetable nor mechanical nor near-human in crustacean make-up and/or what passed for futuristic couture at the time. Instead the nonhuman arrived in utterly nonhuman form: black monoliths ten feet tall.”

—Edward Strickland, from Minimalism: Origins, 2000; quoted by Charlie Gere in Art, Time and Technology, 2006.