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Concerns with Minimalism Writen by: Rebeca Acosta

Concerns with Minimalism

The controversy of minimalism is twofold it deals with the intentions within the movement and it also deals outside conflicts with other movements of the time. My main intention is to figure out what minimalists were collectively going for in their work; which relies on the denial of a number of things that were thought to be inherent in artwork of the time. Some Minimalists theorists and artists argue that Minimalism denies a number of things including politics. What made Minimalism different was its disjunction of meaning; which went from being controlled by the artist to being in the hands of the viewer. This movement in turn led way for a wider range of acceptable works and essentially paved the way for post-modernism. Even though one of the goals of minimalism was to reject politics it participated in politics by reflecting a change in culture and society that was happening at the time both in art and in the entire world. People were more prone to rebellion, rejection of the government (rightly so), and also of higher powers. Minimalism not only rejected all things society values in art, it also put a mirror to society’s conceptions and told the viewer to figure out what to make of this new work.
Pollack did for painting what minimalism did for the whole art world all at once it completely destroyed and made it whole. With the use of fabricated “objects,” industrial materials, and found objects minimalist sculpture changed the essence of art. Before minimalism, good sculpture was seen as having visually interesting elements using classic techniques and fine art elements such as clay, bronze and paint etc. Reasons for the minimalist movement like I stated before are very contradictory and ranging in controversy to get to the root of minimalism one should consider what the works have in common, that is basic form and new modes of expressing them using industrial materials and technologies.
Slight deviation: During the time of minimalism major events in history were going which I would like to point out because referential to the artworks or not cultural and sociological changes were going on in the world and minimalism references social perceptions of art. Attached is a chronology from Minimal Politics by: Maurice Berger this chronology includes major movements including the issues of race equality, sexuality issues, gender equality and the Vietnam War.
Important Minimalist artists of the time include: Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt. Michael Fried intelligently writes in Art and Objecthood about the work of Donald Judd and Robert Morris and the literalist attitude toward sculpture, painting and minimalism. Judd states that what they call specific objects as resuming the lapsed traditions of Russian Constructivist sculpture. I find this argument to be valid in that the Constructivists also held a lot of importance in the objects they used and wanted these objects to be seen as what they were. With reference to Judd and Morris’s commonalities Fried states that: “Above all they are opposed to sculpture that like most painting is ‘made part by part, by addition, composed,’ and in which ‘specific elements… separate from the whole, thus setting up relationships within the work’” Examples the Fried gives of the sculptures they would be opposed to would include the works of David Smith and Anthony Caro (see image 2 and 3). Fried also writes that Morris and Judd express the importance of the values of wholeness, singularness, and invisibility of work’s being. As nearly as possible “one thing” as a single “specific object.” One example of this would be Judd’s Untitled 1970 (image3), about this image Judd states about his work that: “the big problem is that anything that is not absolutely plain begins to have parts in some way. The thing is to be able to work and do things and yet not break up the wholeness that a piece has. To me the piece with the brass and the five verticals is above all that shape.” When I was in high school I went to the Modern art museum in fort Worth, Texas and saw one of Donald Judd’s pieces and the first thing our teacher told us was how the piece was fabricated and not made by the artist. I was not really fazed by this piece and have yet to see a Donald Judd work that excites me but I will say that the works of Morris and Judd are readily perceivable as what they are and even more so just as what they are. Judd’s piece is nothing more than pieces of plexi and brass put together in a boringly orderly way. In this essence they are very understandable. Fried writes on these works “It is I believe the emphasis on shape that accounts for the impression which numerous critics have mentioned, that Judd’s and Morris’s pieces are hollow.” I would have to agree with these assertions. All of these works are absent of anything beyond themselves and therefore are simply just objects rather than sculptures or paintings. I have to agree with the use of object rather than sculpture to define the pieces of work. The newer terms minimalists came up with to describe their works include: “beyond objects,” three dimensional objects, and specific objects. These terms separate this movement from sculpture and art in general and Fried writes that Literalist (Minimalist) “sensibility is theatrical to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work.” Fried justifies this with descriptions of how such works are displayed and what this form of display evokes in the viewer. Fried states the theatricality comes from the fact that the work is seemingly endless and is in the hands of the viewer’s perception rather than an artist’s conception. About this Morris states: “the better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic.” “.. It is this necessary. Greater distance of the object in space from our bodies, in order that it be seen at all, that structures the nonpersonal or public mode. However, it is just this distance between object and subject that creates a more extended situation, because physical participation becomes necessary.” This kind of aesthetic is best pictorially exemplified in the work of Dan Flavin who is most noted for using fluorescent lights in his artworks. The pieces are not about the objects at all (see image 3, Image 4, and Image 5); but rather the environment surrounding them. The light reflecting off of the walls controlling the environment around it largely relies on the viewer not only seeing the light but paying attention to the mood created by the lights. It has less to do with the objects and rather more to do with the whole scene including: the object, the environments of the object, the viewer, and the perceptions of the viewer. Since minimalist work relies so much on the perceptions of the viewer many critics who don’t find it boring, find it overbearing and powerful. Fried writes that the stage presence of the pieces “…is a function, not just of the obtrusiveness and, often even the aggressiveness of literalist work, but of the special complicity that the work exhorts from the beholder. Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder take it in to account, that he take it seriously – and when the fulfillment of that demand consists in simply being aware of it and, so to speak in acting accordingly.
The Monumentality of Minimalism is an important issue with this work. Anna C. Chave writes in Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power that the minimalist works have an overbearing command of power and reek of the “powerfulness” embodied in masculinity. Her critique of Dan Flavin's artwork as phallic (Image6) is something interesting to take into consideration. Chave also states “ Flavin's Diagonal not only looks technological and commercial –like Minimalism generally –it is an industrial power exercised by commodity in a society where virtually everything is for sale.” The statement of power from the standpoint of the use of commodified materials taken in with sexual associations in their titles can be seen as a statement about governmental control over the rights of women which isn’t a totally out of nowhere assertion since Women’s Rights movements some starting points during the 1960’s. Although this is a stretch and Anna C. Chave never out rightly states this. I gathered this standpoint with the thought of commodified objects as a reference to how the way society works is controlled by commodified objects like housewives of the time who would be constantly bombarded with advertisements for household appliances. The sexually rich titles of the works like that of Morris’s Cock/Cunt makes an erotic sexual statement about the products used and the way they were arranged. The titles of these works give them many associations and have many politically references which can blur the line of the meanings of the pieces so much so that one can be inferred in some instances. Chave wrote that: “minimalists themselves were prone to complication their work by ‘associations.’” Also something from the book Movements In Modern Art by David Batchelor he points out commonalities in minimalist art “The majority were made during the second half of the 1960’s; they were all made in New York; they were all made by men, all of whom were in their early thirties, and all of whom are white.” Considering Chaves standpoint on the overbearing, sometimes even threatening presence of these Minimalist works. I would like the further reference some interesting statements from David Batchelor “ On the other hand their might be something unhelpful about making this kind of match between various forms and material and on the one hand, and a set of assumptions about gender or race or a class on the other. It begins to homogenize a body of work before we have properly begun to look at it; and to do so under a label which is at best an extreme abstraction. What I take to be the most important aspects of minimal art do not conform so readily to the typical predicates of the label “masculine”: it is for example, often in varying degrees, decorative light and colorful. The work of Dan Flavin isn’t very masculine at all, on of course can read into the Diagonal and say that the bulbs are phallic in shape but this abstract notion of his work is not a sufficient enough argument. Most of Dan Flavin's work is quite happy in nature and has a calm luminescence which has the power to overtake a room not with control, but, instead with a luminescent calming glow. The piece I saw in Fort Worth, Texas was at the beginning of my art education and I didn’t have the proper knowledge to step back and look at what the light was actually doing instead I looked at the bulb and though “okay I have one of those in my kitchen big deal” When I was at MOMA earlier this semester though I had a rapidly different experience with Flavin piece. It had many colorful lights on one side of wall in a room and it reflected on another side of the wall this intense meshing of the colored lights and I really got the feeling that the artwork was not about the objects in particular but about the space it occupied and the importance of me (the viewer) to notice them. I also distinctly remember feeling really fulfilled as a spectator when I overheard someone say that their friend was telling them about how the lights did some really amazing things in that room and how they didn’t think it was that great. Maybe it was that I finally understood a Dan Flavin piece, which was a type work that I actually for a while dismissed as not art because I didn’t get it. Just the consideration of the effect Flavin's work can have a viewer is not as Fried states when he writes that the work is like a quiet stranger who is causing tension in the room and trying to gain power. In fact Flavin’s work does quite the opposite. It welcomes the viewer with opens arms into a space.

Furthermore with reference to Fried’s statements about the theatre of the pieces I do find it true that these work do a presence different from other works whose totality is solely in the piece itself. Whether it’s Morris’s lights of life or Robert Morris’s plate glass boxes, which simply make one more conscious of the space around them; these works the works do a job in supplying a mood for the rooms they encompass. Fried points out the war going on between “theatre and modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictoral -a war the despite, the literalists’ explicit rejection of modernist painting and sculpture, is not basically a matter of program ad ideology but of experience, conviction, sensibility.” Fried chooses to war these two opposing ideologies against each other because he sees performance of these pieces as a threat to Modernists artworks. He ends Art and objecthood with a very powerful closing statement “ I want to claim that it is by virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theatre. In fact, I am tempted far beyond my knowledge to suggest that, faced with the need to defeat theatre, it is above all the condition of painting and sculpture –the condition, that is, existing in, indeed that of secreting and constituting, a continuous and perpetual present –that other contemporary modern arts and most notably poetry and music aspire.” I will have to admit that when I first read this I was in complete agreement it just makes so much sense. The works perceptibility through time and basic transcendence of current themes in sculpture at the time struck in a really weird way it’s is the first time I thought about these works in such a statement and it makes a whole lot more sense that what Anna C. Chave pens down. Although I did like when she wrote about the monumentality of Richard Serra’s work and how it is so threatening that it actually did kill someone (it should have been titled Anna C. Chave WHEN ART ATTACKS!) but that wasn’t a reasonable argument at all, accidents happen.
David Batchelor sums up his book nicely when he summarized his thoughts on “texts and contexts” at the end of his book Minimalism: Movements in Modern Art He basically states that there is no reason to separate sculpture and minimalism or theatre and modernist artwork. He writes “Associated with the idea of artistic synthesis. Is the idea or ideal, of dissolving the distinction between art and non-art, or of merging with art and life...” and “…. In Fluxus events in general, that the aims of the synthesis and mergence are articulated.” It goes without saying that Batchelor disagrees with Fried. Batchelor moves on from Fried to make a very interesting thought that literalist and modernist might both be right. He nullifies Fried's argument that painting a sculpture have developed in isolation from each other in the twentieth century, “if so then why are there are so many instances of relief painted and pictorial sculpture?” He also goes on to disagree with Fried’s statement that Minimalists works are hollow and make a very poignant argument that this could have only reference some works and mainly that of Morris. Batchelor: “the ‘war’ between pictoriality and theatricality could be re-described from another angle as a different kind of dispute: one between different cultures, or one between different sections of culture, each with its own and divergent experiences and expectation of modernity.” This argument is something I can really relate too especially being of the generation I am in where indifference is all too common a stance, but I believe this is not because I don’t care, so much as that there are so many angles with valid arguments to be considered that I cannot see canceling each other out. In this argument I see between objects and Modern art I feel that neither is right nor wrong just different. The politics of minimalism are that of many art movements in that art is such a relative thing and with enough smart people thinking about and talking about it one can reason their way into justifying or un-justifying this movement. Fried compares it to theatre, Chave considers it a threat, and Batchelor just sees and tries to appreciate for what it is a period of vast change in the art world in a time when the world itself was changing a lot in many different respects. To further reference politics Dan Flavin made a very powerful piece about Vietnam, which although still used fluorescent light differed from his usual aura (happiness) and had a dark room with dim red lights that looked fallen in the corner. This in respect to Minimalism and modernist work has a lot of depth and emotion, represents the objects as what they are and gives the room emotion. Without minimalism would installation art be around in the same way if at all? I think “theatricality” in artwork today is not a threat but rather a different vantage point from which to view things and for the art world to grow. Although my way of making differs from many minimalists work sometimes I enjoy the simplicity of Sol Dewitt’s work in that they are understandable and yet have a beauty, which is similar to what I strive for in my work. In this respect I would like to conclude my paper by sating that David Bachelors assertions that both Modernism and Minimalism have valid aspects is where I also stand. Minimalism is art.

”Minimalism may have never existed, but its influence is felt everywhere” ~ Batchelor

“Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically” ~ Sol LeWitt (one of my favorite artists.)

IMAGE 1

Anthony Curo
Table Piece CCCCXXVIII
1977/1979
Rusted and varnished steel
23 by 58 by 27 in. 58.4 by 147.3 by 68.6 cm.
MIN 4741
from: www.marcselwynfineart.com/.../caro/caro_05.htmlIMAGE2


David Smith Cubi XIX, 1964
Stainless Steel, Tate: Purchased 1966
© Estate of David Smith/ VAGA, New York, DACS 2006

IMAGE3
Dan FLAVIN

United States of America 1933 – 1996

View Biography

untitled (for Robert, with fond regards)

Untitled (for Robert with fond regards) 1977

fluorescent tubes

no. 2 from an edition of 3

244.0 (h) x 244.0 (w) x 14.0 (d) cm

not signed, not dated

Purchased 1979

NGA 1980.744.A-B © Dan Flavin. Licensed by ARS & VISCOPY, Australia

IMAGE 4
Dan FLAVIN
American 1933–96
untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg) 1972–73
yellow and green fluorescent light, edition 1/3
246.4 x 213.4 x 25.4 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Panza Collection
© Dan Flavin/ARS, New York. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia
Photo by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
IMAGE 5
One (monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush), created in response to the Vietnam War, is made from blood-colored tubes that jut off the wall aggressively -- invading the viewer's space.
IMAGE 6