Although Michael Fried’s and Morris’s essays on Minimalism are usually set up as opposite polarities, I would like to argue that a comparison with Neoconcretism highlights that both authors shared, in fact, a common fear of an ‘intimate’ encounter described in strongly affective terms. To demonstrate this, I would like to quote at some length from an essay on Anthony Caro by Michael Fried in which he also distinguishes modes of distant and intimate viewing:

[In Caro’s work] [w]e step back, see how it looks […] – above all we put it at arm’s length: this is what composing, seeing it in compositional terms, means. We distance it. And our inclination to do this amounts in effect to a desire to escape the work, to break its grip on us, to destroy the intimacy it threatens to create, to pull out. And one doesn’t step back or pull out just a little, or more or less (the relevant comparison is with human relationships here). One is either in or out: and if one steps back, whatever the grip of the things was or may have been is broken or forestalled, and whatever the relationship was or may have been is ended or aborted. There is even a sense in which it is only then that one begins to see: that one becomes a spectator.

Fried may have regarded Minimalist sculptures as lacking the ‘distance’ required by Caro’s works, but it could be argued that Morris too chose to ‘step back’, and position sculptures ‘at arm’s length’. Like Judd’s seductive works, Morris’s sculptures are stuck in a double-bind: it is difficult to view them from a distance for any extended period of time since they lack the kind of composition presented by Caro’s elegant painted forms, but at the same time they forbid any intimate relation.
Unlike Fried’s or Morris’s conception of the relationship with the other as a confrontation and a source of anxiety, the Neoconcretists thought of it as a dialogue. Whereas for Fried one is ‘either in or out’ of the ‘grip’ of a sculpture, as in ‘human relationships’, for the Neoconcretists, one can be both. Extending the comparison with human relationships suggested by Fried, it seems that rather than the kind of passionate embrace which Fried saw as a ‘threat’ to sculpture, Neoconcrete works are closer to the familiarity of friendship. The viewers’ movements in Clark’s ‘Bichos’, or Oiticica’s ‘Box Bólides’, are made in order to reveal the aesthetic aspects of the work, whether the former’s multifarious forms or the latter’s nuances of colours. In this dialogue, the viewer acts, and then receives a response, or not, from the works, which either reveal a new hidden dimension or actually resist the viewer’s gesture.