Minimalism

The following piece will use the argument of Morris and others that claim that a work of art should no longer simply be understood as an object but more as a field and a process, by critically assessing the ways in which minimalism provides us with an expanded understanding of what a work of art can be. More than half of the best work in the last couple of years has been neither painting nor sculpture. It has been usually close relation in one way or another, but the work is diverse. Using Morris’s understanding and others this essay will use two examples to support this argument.

        Minimalism is mostly simplified configurations that artists produce to represent their work. The materials in which minimalists often use tend to be geometrically arranged. It has usually a strong quality of unmixed genuine colour, space, materials and form. It surfaced in the late 1950s, in the U.S mainly. It was a reaction against abstract expressionism and the abstractionist account of modern art more generally. Its combination is of modernists asserting reduce in medium and denying the relationship of its composition. Moving away from late modernisms aesthetic order. This was to accentuate the wholeness of the work as a ‘specific object’^[1]. Specifically in relation to sculpture, contributing the real relationship of space giving the illusion inclination of painting: “Three dimensions are real space… Actual space is fundamentally more powerful and specific than paint on flat surface”^[2]. Hence Judd houses the work under the category of ‘three dimensional work’.

Robert Morris is considered by many artist and critics to be one of the leading sculpture’s working in the new Minimal style. His works and ideas have helped to outline a variety of problems inherent in Minimal sculpture. In the following notes, Morris discusses some of these problems, including those of viewer participation, size, scale, surface, and of gestalt.

In 1967, in this piece of literature, Notes on Sculpture 3: Notes and Non-Sequiturs‘ from Challenging Art: Artforum1962-1974^[3] Robert Morris presents the Minimalist argument against painting:

The trouble with painting is not its inescapable illusionism per se. Therefore this inherent illusionism brings with it a non-actual elusiveness or indeterminate allusiveness. The method has become antique in todays society. The concept of minimalism has become quiet antique, due to the division of experience of that marks on a flat surface produce. ^[4]

        This movement has obvious cultural and historical reasons, which has caused this to materialize. For many years the division of ‘object and allusion’ sustained itself under the force of profuse bureaucratic innovations within the work itself. This has worn thin and its premises cease to convince the viewer. The duality of experience is not direct enough in itself. That which has ambiguity built into it is not acceptable to an experiential and pragmatic outlook.

Donald Judd was an artist from America; he rejected the traditional type of art such as sculpture and painting. This brought him to the conception of art made around the whole idea of the object and its existence in a particular environment. His work was apart of the Minimalist movement; his goal was to eliminate art that was of Abstract Expressionists’ to depend on the self-referential finding of the painter. Like Judd making a series of repeated or single handedly geometric forms produced from machine made materials that where industrialized. This led to the abandonment of the artists touch. Judd’s geometric forms and modular pieces have been often criticized. This is due to an inadequacy of content; it is that simplicity that calls into question of the nature of art and the theory of Minimalist sculpture as an object of reflection, one whose literal constant presence advices the process of beholding.

        Judd and Morris both allege the consumption of composition as a means of relating parts of a work to others. The Minimalist work comes from other means of processes manufactured, less artistic, or even artisanal. Morris also says

Such work has the feel and look of openness, extendibility, accessibility, public-ness, repeatability, equanimity, directness, immediacy, and has been formed by clear decision rather than groping craft would seem to have a few social implications, none of which are negative. Such work would undoubtedly be boring to those who long for access to an exclusive distinctiveness, the experience of which reassures their superior perception.^[5]

        Instead, a different kind of order forms the foundation of Minimalist work, an order that is not based on previous art orders, but is an order so basic to culture that its obviousness makes it nearly invisible. This is an order of stacking, symmetry, non-hierarchical distributions, based upon the grid and the rectangular corner. In short, this is the order of industrial manufacture and distribution, but it also has a history traceable to prehistory. The most obvious unit of this type of forming is the cube or block, which along with the right-angle grid as method of distribution and placement. This offers a kind of morpheme‖ and syntax‖ that are central to the cultural premise of forming.^[6] Crucially, the way in which Minimalist work would appear is not the principal interest: they are explicitly intended to frustrate that form of regard which delights in complex phenomenal effects and inventive compositional relations. This had consequences for how the Minimalist work addressed viewers, as an object placed within a particular site.^[7]

        Undeniably, site-specificity might begin by simply describing the terms if such an exchange. If one takes the proposition that the values of actions, events and statements are affected by their local position, by where they are placed and the way that they are placed in relation to what they are apart of. They too a work of art will define the place and position. Straightforwardly, this suggests location. To read the sign is to discover the evidence, recognizing its place within the semiotic system. One can go on from this and argue that the location in reading of an object, event or image that it’s position has a political, aesthetic, institutional, geographical or other dissertation that can indicate what it can prevail to be.^[8]