minimalism

 

schools of contemporary art and music, with their origins in the 1960s, that have emphasized simplicity and objectivity.

Minimalism in the Visual Arts

Reacting against the formal excesses and raw emotionalism of abstract expressionism, the practitioners of minimal art (also sometimes called ABC art) strove to focus attention on the object as an object, reducing its historical and expressive content to the bare minimum. Many minimalist artists were sculptors concerned with reducing form to its utmost simplicity. They used flat surface colors, factory finishes, and industrial materials. The use of serial repetitions contributed to their goal. Artists such as Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin were associated with the movement. The exhibition “Primary Structures,” held in New York in 1966, spotlighted works of this school. Minimalism gave rise to process art, land art, performance art, conceptual art, and installation art.

Minimalism in Music

In music, the minimalist movement was, like minimal art, a reaction against a then-current form, with composers rejecting many of the dry intellectual complexities and the emotional sterility of serial music and other modern forms. Generally, minimalist compositions tend to emphasize simplicity in melodic line and harmonic progression, to stress repetition and rhythmic patterns, and to reduce historical or expressive reference. The use of electronic instruments is common in minimalist music, as are influences from Asia and Africa. Among prominent minimalist composers are Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and John Adams.

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Richard Serra. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and a bridge to Postmodern art practices.

The term has expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, as in the compositions of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Terry Riley. (See also Post-Minimalism).

The term "minimalist" is often applied colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials. It has also been used to describe the plays of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.

Musical minimalism

Main article: Minimalist music

In art music of the last 35 years, the term minimalism is sometimes applied to music which displays some or all of the following features: repetition (often of short musical phrases, with minimal variations over long periods of time, ostinati) or stasis (often in the form of drones and long tones); emphasis on consonant harmony; a steady pulse; hypnotic effect; sometimes use of phase shifting where parts gradually move out of sync with each other. Minimalist music can sometimes sound similar to different forms of electronic music (e.g. Basic Channel), as well as the texture-based compositions of composers such as Gyorgy Ligeti; it is often the case that the end result is similar, but the approach is not.

The term minimalism, endowed independently by composer-critics Michael Nyman and Tom Johnson, has been controversial, but was in wide use by the mid-1970s. The application of a visual art term to music has been protested; however, not only do minimalist sculpture and music share a certain spare simplicity of means and an aversion to ornamental detail, but many of the early minimalist concerts happened in connection with exhibits of minimalist art by Sol LeWitt and others. Several composers associated with minimalism have disavowed the term, notably Philip Glass, who has reportedly said, "That word should be stamped out!!"^[1]

A recent form of minimalistic music, Minimal techno, a sub-genre of Techno music, is characterized by a stripped-down, glitchy sound, simple 4/4 beats (usually around 120-135 BPM), repetition of short loops, and subtle changes.

Minimalist design

The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture. In addition, the work De Stijl artists is a big source of reference this kind of work. De Stijl expanded the ideas that could be expressed by using basic elements such as lines and planes organized in very particular manners.

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto "Less is more" to describe his aesthetic tactics of flattening and emphasizing the building's frame, eliminating interior walls and adopting an open plan, and reducing the structure to a strong, transparent, elegant skin. Designer Buckminster Fuller adopted a similar saying, "Doing more with less", but his concerns were oriented towards technology and engineering rather than aesthetics. The other modern master people still observe to study reductivist ideas is Luis Barragan. In minimalism, the architectural designers pay special attention to the connection between perfect planes, elegant lighting, and careful consideration of the void spaces left over after the removal of three dimensional shapes from an architectural design.

Contemporary architects working in this tradition include John Pawson, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Alvaro Siza, Tadao Ando, Alberto Campo Baeza,Yoshio Taniguchi, Peter Zumthor, Vincent Van Duysen, Claudio Silvestrin, Michael Gabellini, and Richard Gluckman.^[2]

Minimalism in visual art

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Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as "literalist art"^[3] and "ABC Art"^[4] emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it. As artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1977 catalog essay Last Exit: Painting, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about Modernist Painting's reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, even though the term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such.

In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by composer John Cage, poet William Carlos Williams, and architect Frederick Law Olmsted. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in complete opposition to the previous decade's Abstract Expressionists. Very soon they created a minimal style, whose features included: rectangular and cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, industrial materials, all of which leads to immediate visual impact.

The first art specifically associated with Minimalism was Frank Stella, whose "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas's stripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas hung. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the "minimal," energy-filled paintings of Willem De Kooning or Franz Kline and leaned more toward the anonymous field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MOMA show, artists like Ralph Humphrey and Robert Ryman had begun to explore monochromatic formats by the late 50's.

Minimalist sculpture is greatly focused on the materials used (see Donald Judd, the early works of Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin).

The origins of Minimalism are in the geometric abstractions of pre-World War II painters in the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivists and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi (whose work was a major influence on the Minimalism of Robert Morris).The Russian Constructivists proclaiming the distillation was in order to create a universal language of art which the masses were meant to understand. It may have also supported the rapid industrialization planned for the massive country. Brâncuşi's work was much more of a search for the purity of the form and thus paved the way for the abstractions that were to come, such as minimalism.

This movement was heavily criticised by the high modernist formalist art critics and historians. It was called futile, mechanistic, mandarin, elitist, circular, endless, entropic, pedantic and authoritarian. The artists of Minimalism were interested in how the rational categories of painting and sculptures were intriniscally delimiting and this is why many worked in 3-D and paid critical attention away from expression and toward process and materiality (i.e., time and space). Some very anxious critics thought Minimalist work of art was a complete misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture according to critic Clement Greenberg. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, most evident in sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator transforming the act of viewing the work into a type of spectacle in which the artifice of the act observation and participation were unveiled. Fried's opinionated essay was immediately challenged by artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated the following: "What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing--namely being himself theatrical." What Smithson meant by this was that Fried had in fact delivered "a long overdue spectacle" himself, and that Fried had brought on a sort of "fictive inquisition", or more precisely, "a ready-made parody of the war between Renaissance classicism (modernity) versus Manneristic anti-classicism (theatre)."

Other Minimalist artists include: Richard Allen, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Bell, Ronald Bladen, Mel Bochner, Norman Carlberg, Judy Chicago, Erwin Hauer, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, John McCracken, Paul Mogensen, David Novros, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, and Anne Truitt

Ad Reinhardt summed up the style in these terms: 'The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.'

Also notable are the Postminimalist artists, including Eva Hesse, Martin Puryear, Joel Shapiro and Hannah Wilke. The hallmark of Postminimalism is the often distinct references to objects without direct representation.

Literary minimalism

Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist authors eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story, to "choose sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than reacting to directions from the author. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional; they may be pool supply salespeople or second tier athletic coaches rather than famous detectives or the fabulously wealthy. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories.

Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classifiy this prose style as minimalism.

Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the meta-fiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also spare with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter.

Minimalist authors, or those who are identified with minimalism during certain periods of their writing careers, include the following: Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Hempel, Eneas McNulty, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, Richard Ford and Alicia Erian.

American poets such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, and Aram Saroyan are sometimes identified with their minimalist style.

The Irish author Samuel Beckett is also known for his minimalist plays and prose.

Notes

See also

• Computing minimalism
• Worse is better
• Modular constructivism
• Formalism (art)
• Geometric abstraction
• Shaped canvas
• Minimal Techno
• List of minimalist artists

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