Reading: James Meyer- Minimalism; Michael Fried's Art and Objecthood; Donald Judd's Specific Objects

MINIMALISM- JAMES MEYER

what is minimalism?

-"artistic tendency whose 'organizing principles' were 'the right angle, the square, and the cube... rendered with a minimum of incident or compositional maneuvering"

-"'a movement, primarily in postwar America, towards an art...that makes its statement with limited, if not the fewest possible, resources'"

-"'last of the modernist styles'...transition between the modern and postmodern"

-Sol LeWitt: undefined art style w no limits "'to what it is and isn't'"

-"meanings altered depending on the moment or context of its use"

-two implications:

1. "minimal" = allusion to "simple" organization
2. mode of production (industrially made units --> minimum of artistic labor)
-viewers used to abstract expressionism--> criticized that work of art should be "handmade product of a subjective self"
-late 1960s/late 20th century: "general acceptance of minimalism as a leading movement"

MORRIS:
-making sculpture, not objects
-whole geometric sculpture along w readymades & casts of part objects
-suggests duchamp & johns

LEWITT:
-inspired by serial photography of eadweard muybridge
-impressed by large-scale painting
-bright hued, hand painted geometric art

JUDD:
-aspired to produce high formalist art, extend the large-scale & simple shapes of abstract expressionism into three dimensions
-specific object: art form that's neither painting or sculpture but in between
-objects & reliefs
-mural scale & wholeness
-suggests newman, rothko, & pollack

FLAVIN:
-objects & reliefs
-mural scale & wholeness
-suggests newman, rothko, & pollack

ANDRE:
-modernist sculpture
-suggests brancusi & rodin

• larger works of art required an innovation in gallery design. smaller galleries were changed to large white rooms w high ceilings, "flexible track lighting, and shiny parquet floors" (white cube)

"Park Place" style:
-geometric shape, applied/bold color
-"represented in 'Primary Structures' by...Grosvenor, Myers, and Forakis"
-"use allusive shapes that pointed beyond the material object"

Green Gallery:
-"muted by contrast [regarding Park Place]"
-"rectilinear, undynamic, and visually bland...more austere kind of Primary Structure"
-"reductive tendency toward 'minimal' or 'ABC' art"
-"hid subject matter 'behind impassive surfaces'"

how was primary structure defined?
-LeWitt used the term structures which "implied a three-dimensional art form unfettered by associations with such traditional media as sculpture or painting...a clear, tectonic organization, a work built in a factory rather than the...artist's hand"
-the term primary was to mean a "form so basic that it did not have to be invented, so standard that it did not reflect the artist's personal decision-making"
-critic Robert Coates: the artist was more of a designer & the models were "executed by 'the lathe and milling machine operators'"

-"the minimal object embodied a contemporary, 'cool' aesthetic of refusal"
-"the most basic shapes 'offer a maximum resistance to perceptual separation'" (Morris)
-"Synthetic materials made these shapes...more legible: plexiglas and anodized aluminum made for a cleaner profile" (Judd)

Primary Structures exhibit
-in the jewish museum
-"replaced the traditional, pedestal scale of sculpture with architectural scale, muddled tones with bright or severe colors, baroque excess with tasteful austerity... simplify, to reduce"
-McShine suggested that Tony Smith and Anthony Caro were the 'father' figures of primary structure
-exhibit was meant to show a "variety of work worth looking at"; inclusiveness --> successful show
-"survey of recent work, and the art of the sixties looked different"
-had "smooth, shiny surfaces of fiberglass and sheet metal, simplified geometries, and bright color... different sense of scale"
-"sized to the viewer's body and the gallery space, removed from the pedestal and placed on the floor...explored typically architectural concerns of 'space, volume, movement, light'" (critic: Charlotte Willard)

• fashion quickly took in minimalism around the same time as minimal art had popped up --> "rapid, dialectical mechanism of publicity and commodification propelling the New York art world of the sixties"
• media about pop in 1963-1964 caused "realms of art, fashion, and journalism to intersect"
• warhol, lichtenstein, oldenburg, rosenquist became art to collect --> "aesthetically pleasing or formally significant work had taken a back seat to novelty- a prizing of the new for the sake of the new"
• "fashion and publicity drove the art world rather than serious innovation" (critic: John Canaday) --> trends were in & out
• "ties between fine art, consumerism, and fashion as inescapable relations of twentieth-century culture" (T.J. Clark)
• "shift from the prosperous economy of the immediate postwar years to the accelerated consumer culture of the sixties, when the development of new techniques of production and distribution...expansive mass media"
• "during the early sixties the imagery changed. artists posed not in lonely garrets but in 'lifestyle' sections or in fashion shoots, endorsing their own work" --> "the audience for advanced work was no longer the industrial bourgeoisie of the early part of the century...in the affluent society of late fifties and sixties America, a middle class of more modest means had become concerned with its leisure and acculturation"
• Mel Bochner: "admired how the work of...Andre and Judd suggested a radical revision of sculptural syntax- a rejection of compositional balancing for a pre-planned serial arrangement"

In-Class discussion:

-large in scale, geometric, nothing on a pedestal

-on floor, against wall, suspended from ceiling

-interacts architecturally; negotiates the space

-large white walls, tracked lighting

-exhibition spaces change to accomodate larger work
-michael fried is similar to greenberg, seeing art at its best when it's true to its material

• judy chicago- rainbow spectrum piece

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ART & OBJECTHOOD- MICHAEL FRIED

michael fried: if the idea is that the artist curates how the viewer sees/interacts w the work, then the artwork stops existing once viewer is not there; accuses minimalism of being theatrical
Minimal art a.k.a. literalist art
-"belongs...to the history...of sensibility"
-"expression of a general and pervasive condition"
-"in relation both to modernist painting and modernist sculpture"

• literalist case against painting:

-"relational character of almost all painting"
-"ubiquitousness... of pictorial illusion"

Judd & Robert Morris
-"opposed to sculpture that...is 'made part by part, by addition, composed'"
-Specific object: "assert the value of wholeness, singleness, and indivisibility"
-"critical factor is shape"
-"Morris's 'unitary forms' are polyhedrons that resist being grasped other than as a single shape... shape itself...'the most important sculptural value'"
-the shape is the object: "what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape"
-"conflict has gradually emerged between shape as a fundamental property of objects and shape as a medium of painting"
-"modernist painting has come to find it imperative that it defeat... its own objecthood"
-Judd's remark: “The new [i.e., literalist] work obviously resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but it is nearer to painting”

object hood: "the condition of non-art"
-"the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation...includes the beholder...heightened by 'the strength of the constant, known shape, the gestalt" our experience/reaction looking at the art
-largeness of piece --> distances viewer --> "makes the beholder a subject and the piece... an object"
-physical participation is necessary
-literalist works must confront the viewer/be placed in his way
-presence of literalist art =theatrical effect, a stage presence
-something has "presence when it demands that the beholder take it into account, that he takes it seriously"
-"the beholder knows himself to stand in an...open-ended...relation as subject to the impassive object"
-"size of much literalist work... compares fairly closely with that of the human body"
-"hallowness of most literalist work, the quality of having an inside- is...anthropomorphic (having human characteristics)

• "hidden naturalism...lies at the core of literalist theory & practice"
• "'I didn't think of them [i.e., the sculptures he "always" made] as sculptures but as presences of a sort.” - Tony Smith
• "what is wrong w literalist work is not that it is anthropomorphic but that the meaning...is theatrical"

-"it is in the interest...of theatre that literalist ideology rejects both modernist painting...modernist sculpture"
-war btwn theatre & modernist painting, btwn theatrical & pictorial

• a situation in which things/objects that you see/experience do not belong to you but your presence there makes it feel as if this experience does belong to you

-objecthood = issue for modernist sculpture (despite sculpture being 3D, resembling ordinary objects & literalist work)
-emergence of new sculptural style (David Smith as a master): "render substance entirely optical, and form, whether pictorial, sculptural, or architectural, as an integral part of ambient space- this brings anti- illusionism full circle"

Anthony Caro:
-work is more "resistant to being seen in terms of objecthood than that of David Smith"
-"individual elements bestow significance on one another...by...juxtaposition"
-"emphasis on abstractness, on radical unlikeness to nature" (Greenberg)

1. "The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their
ability to defeat theatre...need to establish a drastically different relation to its audience...For theatre has an audience...the other arts do not.. literalist art, too, possesses an audience...that the beholder is confronted by literalist work within a situation that he experiences as his... important sense in which the work...exists for him alone, even if he is not actually alone with the work at the time...one art that...escapes theatre entirely—the movies...are acceptable to modernist sensibility whereas all but the most successful painting, sculpture, music, and poetry is not. Because cinema escapes theatre...it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theatre and theatricality...the automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge...means that the cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art."

2. "Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre...a failure to register the enormous difference in quality between, say, the music of Carter and that of Cage or between the
paintings of Louis and those of Rauschenberg means that the real distinctions...are displaced by
the illusion that the barriers between the arts are in the process of crumbling...the arts themselves are at last sliding towards some kind of final, implosive, hugely desirable synthesis. Whereas in fact the individual arts have never been more explicitly concerned with the conventions that constitute their
respective essences."

3. "The concepts of quality and value-...these are central to art...-are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts...literalists have largely avoided the issue of value or quality at the same time as they have shown considerable uncertainty as to whether or not what they are making is art...Judd himself has as much as acknowledged the problematic character of the
literalist enterprise by his claim, “A work needs only to be interesting. ” For Judd...all that matters is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain (his) interest. Whereas within the modernist arts nothing short of conviction...matters at all. (Literalist work is often condemned...for being boring. A tougher charge would be that it is merely interesting.) The interest of a given work resides, in Judd's view, both in its character as a whole and in the sheer specificity of the materials of which it is made"

-"central to literalist art and theory is essentially a presentment of endless, or indefinite, duration. Once again Smith's account of his night drive is relevant. The literalist preoccupation with time—more precisely, with the duration of the experience...paradigmatically theatrical"

difference between literalist work and modernist painting and sculpture:
-"one's experience of the latter has no duration—not because one in fact experiences a picture by Noland or Olitski or a sculpture by David Smith or Caro in no time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest. It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, th
at one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it."
-"virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theatre"

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SPECIFIC OBJECTS- DONALD JUDD

• three-dimensional work does not constitute a movement/style; not enough in common
• use of 3D objects is an alternative to painting & sculpture
• donald judd: organizing in space

what's wrong with painting:

-rectangular plane placed flat against the wall

-rectangle determines & limits what is on/in it; edges are a boundary

-composition reacts to the rectangle

-rectangle becomes definite form, not neutral limit

-plane is emphasized & single; relationship btwn plane of canvas & wall is specific

• "new work obviously resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but it is nearer to painting"

what's wrong with sculpture:
-newest thing about sculpture is broad scale; materials more emphasized
-material doesn't have its own movement; simply imitates movement

-made part by part/composed

-not much contrast btwn wood & metal, not much color

-color is not important

new three-dimensional work:

-a single thing

-open & extended

-small amount of work, compared to painting & sculpture

-work's being like an object or being specific

-range is wide, nature isn't set yet

-real space --> no illusionism & "literal space, space in & around marks & colors" (like painting)

-actual space = more powerful & specific

-made according to complex purposes; "not scattered but asserted by one form"

-a work doesn't need a lot to look at

-alone, more intense, clear, powerful; not "diluted by an inherited format"

-shape, image, color, & surface are single

-use of new materials, industrial products

-new materials aren't obviously art

-form & materials = closely related

• "the aspects of neutrality, redundancy and form and imagery could not be coextensive without three dimensions and without the particular material"
• "a work needs only to be interesting"
• "in earlier art the complexity was displayed and built the quality"