Minimalistic Art of The 1960’s

The word “minimal” is used freely these days in mention of any styl­istic strictness in the arts. The term “Mini­malist” is only slightly more accurate when applied to works of visual art. It carries two distinct impli­ca­tions, each with its own historical reso­nances. The term may refer to art, primarily carving or three-dimensional work made after 1960, that is abstract or even more lifeless visually than “abstract” suggests and unpro­ductive with deco­rative detail, in which geometry is stressed and mean­ingful tech­nique avoided. The works of artists such as Donald Judd, Ron Bladen, and Tony Smith qualify as Mini­malist in this sense. The art history of this strain of work includes Supremacist, De Stijl, and Construc­tivist abstract painting and sculpture, from that of Russians such a Kasimir Malevich and Alek­sandr Rodchenko. Almost as important to this mode of Mini­malism as its art history past is the wide back­ground of American mass production. Artists such as Judd and Smith responded to the skep­tical abun­dance of industry by using its services to produce objects purposely unlike what the wealth of mass production lets out. These artists recog­nized that industry restricted the physics of objects to a degree that no single artist could, and they resorted to indus­trial production in order to benefit themselves.

The other sense of “Mini­malist” refers to the trend of such people as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Robert Morris to present as art things that are or were when first displayed from raw mate­rials or estab­lished objects, that is, mini­mally spread out from mere artless stuff. Such works were often planned to throw into relief the perceptual and insti­tu­tional condi­tions of arts support, though not everyone is willing to see those terms laid exposed. The historical sources for this type of work include the object “ready­mades” of Marcel Duchamp and the sculpture of Constantine Brancusi, works that tested the limits of “artwork” as nothing before them had done.

The tension between these two currents of Mini­malist sensi­bility and indus­trial aesthetics and the blur of difference between art and non-art gave American art of the 1960s a rational intensity scarcely seen in art before or ever since. The tension is obvious in contrasts between early works of such artists as, Ron Bladen and Carl Andre, and even in works from different years by the same artist, as in the cases of Robert Grosvenor, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson. Whether the idea or terms of a work of art have prece­dence over its material reality and who decides this were issues throughout the Mini­malist years. The works of some artists regardless of what they may have said to the contrary, confirmed under­standing as the deter­mi­native dimension of people and of art; others gave domi­nance to the observers physical atten­tiveness as the point of view from which he must interpret an artworks basis and his own role in figuring out what he sees. A widely held assumption in the New York art world of the 1960s was that in expres­sions of the way his work resists easy reading, an artist might suggest without words a guess of how and where signif­i­cance occurs and of what it is to see percep­tively. Among the so-called Mini­malists were artists who attempted to do just that.

The impulse behind Mini­malism, the drive to explain the condi­tions in which art takes a place in the world, moti­vated visual artists working sepa­rately in various coun­tries in the 1960s. Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, and Piero Manzoni in Europe, Anthony Caro and William Turnbull in England, and Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Carl Andre in America all fall within the defi­n­ition that might be given the inter­na­tional expe­rience of “Minimalism.”

Artists of all postwar gener­a­tions concur that to accept without question the seem­ingly self-explanatory worth of everyday life in America is to be persuaded by enter­tainment, adver­tisement, and political exhi­bition into dwelling self­ishly in a world of built illu­sions. The question is whether contem­porary art offers any genuine contrast to consumer consciousness. Mini­malist artists tried to do that by chal­lenging people with the dead honest facts of art, making them graze, so to speak, rather than welcoming them to throw them­selves into the  aesthetics.

I deviate with purpose from the ordinary critical practice of distin­guishing between Mini­malism and Post-Minimalism because the difference implies that the cate­go­rization is more precise than it can be. “Mini­malism,” for what it is, arguably explains every­thing from the early sculp­tures of Donald Judd and Tony Smith to early and recent offerings of mate­rials and tech­niques by Tony Cragg, Meg Webster, Wolfgang Laib. For the meantime, the artists them­selves corre­spond in little but their rejection of “Mini­malism” as a term fitting to what they have done. “Art excludes the unnec­essary,” Carl Andre wrote in 1959, and added, twenty-five years later, “That is the only true sense for me of mini­malism.” I agree with Andre.

 

Some of the most confusing terms in the termi­nology of modern art end in “ism.” A few, such as “Futurism” and “Surre­alism,” were coined by artists, and backed up with mani­festos, to serve as code words for a styl­istic or ideo­logical agenda. Most subse­quent “isms” have begun as the shorthand of critics seeking to spot­light affinities in works of various artists, regardless of the artists alleged inten­tions. “Mini­malism” is an example: what the term really denotes is a manner of remem­bering, grouping, and ranking certain artworks of the recent past.