Download Date: May 17, 2011 EI Presenter: Dina Wills Minimalist Art I had met

Date:
EI Presenter:
May 17, 2011
Dina Wills
Minimalist Art
I had met minimalism in the arts before Larry Fong put up the exhibition in the JSMA
Northwest Gallery, but I didn’t know it by name. Minimalism is a concept used in many arts - theater, dance, fiction, visual art, architecture, music. In the early 80s in Seattle, Merce
Cunningham, legendary dancer and lifelong partner of composer John Cage, gave a dance
concert in which he sat on a chair, perfectly still, for 15 minutes. My husband and I remember
visiting an art gallery in New York, where a painting that was all white, perhaps with brush
marks, puzzled us greatly. Last year the Eugene Symphony played a piece by composer John
Adams, “The Dharma at Big Sur” which I liked so much I bought the CD. I have seen Samuel
Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” many times, and always enjoy it. I knew much more about
theater and music than I did about visual art and dance, before I started researching this topic.
Minimalism came into the arts in NYC in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, to scathing criticism,
and more thoughtful criticism from people who believed in the artists and tried to understand
their points of view. In 1966, the Jewish Museum in NY opened the exhibition “Primary
Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture” with everyone in the contemporary art
scene there, and extensive coverage in media. It included sculpture by Robert Smithson, leaning
planks by Judy Chicago and John McCracken, Ellsworth Kelly’s relief Blue Disc. A line of 137
straw-colored bricks on the floor called Lever by Carl Andre. Robert Morris and Donald Judd
showed sculptures of different gray geometric shapes. There was an open cubic lattice by Sol
LeWitt (Geometric Figures in NW Gallery) and Cage, stainless steel bars in a base and top, a
“portrait” of composer John Cage by Walter De Maria. These are names that appear often in
later discussions of minimalist art.
Rather than try to paraphrase one definition of minimalism, I want to used definitions I
found:
 The subject is reduced to its necessary elements. (Artists) very explicitly stated that art is
not self-expression, in a strong reaction against Abstract Expressionism (Wikipedia)
 It emphasized highly simplified, usually geometric forms, clear composition, clean
execution and impersonal appearance. Minimal art made use of grids, serial or modular
organization and machined fabrication to reduce or eliminate evidence of the artist’s
role I producing the work or making decisions about its appearance. (It) concentrated
exclusively on physical existence, and perceptual experience by the viewer. Minimalism
offered no consistent theoretical framework, and its dimensions, meaning and origins
remain open to interpretation. (The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists)
 A widely held assumption was that in terms of the way (an artist’s) work resists easy
reading, an artist might propose without words a theory of how and where meaning
occurs and of what it is to see art with (one own understanding). (Baker, pp. 10-13)
 Ellsworth Kelly ranks as the most prominent pioneer of hard-edge painting. (The Oxford
Dictionary of American Art and Artists).
 The term “hard-edge painting” is used when critics discuss the work of Ellsworth Kelly,
Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others. Hard-edged
painting is characterized by large, simplified, usually geometric forms on a flat surface –

precise, razor-sharp contours, broad areas of bright, unmodulated color stained on to
unprimed canvas . . . Hard-edge, simple form, linear rather than painterly approach –
emphasizes two-dimensionality and allows viewers an immediate, purely visual
response. (Britannica Online).
As one example, Ad Reinhardt’s art is said to be cool, controlled and representative of
art-as-art-as-art as he called it. His last paintings are usually 5 feet square, divided in
nine black equal squares. No brush strokes are apparent. It is work that is impossible to
reproduce, although the actual works have a baffling fascination as the eye strains to
pick up the exceedingly fine gradations. (The Oxford Companion to Wester Art).
Some influences on the minimalist art in the NW Gallery exhibit
Californian John McCraken is best known for “planks”, monolithic, emotionless boards
that lean against a wall, with highly finished immaculate surfaces. Oregon artist LeRoy Setziol
has “Leaning Board” (1970) in the show. He has carved parts of it, but the highly finished
surface is there.
Donald Judd wrote reviews and articles about the minimalist art of others, “while his
own sculpture hailed from a future already in the process of decay – his shiny boxes would soon
become tarnished.” (Meyer, p.60) Judd’s work in the gallery, “Untitled” (1986) is four joined
panels of aluminum, plexiglass and enamel. Florence Pierce’s “Untitled” (2000) uses resin and
pigment poured over mirrored plexiglass, materials often used by other minimalist artists.
Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria worked on huge, site-specific minimalist art.
Robert Smithson produced “Spiral Jetty” in 1970 on the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
The environmental work is reached via a wash boarded gravel road that cut through a
landscape that has that Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness. Built of black basalt,
limestone rocks and earth in a year when the water level was unusually low, “Spiral Jetty”
disappeared for 25 years as the lake returned to its normal level. In 1999, “Spiral Jetty” rose
again, covered in salt crystals glistening white.
Kenneth Baker regards Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” (1977) as “the closest
thing to a masterpiece to come out of Minimalism. Situated on a high plateau in the remote
North Plains of New Mexico, it is a grid array of 400 vertical stainless steel poles. There is no
visible trace of the engineering involved in their placement. They define a plane parallel to sea
level, so their lengths, averaging 20 feet, vary with the land elevation.” (Baker, pp. 125-26)
Geoff Dyer (New Yorker, April 18, 2011) has described the effects that this installation
has on a viewer. “As the sun began to drop, the poles sprouted shadows and the tips sparkled
as if stars were perched on them . . . The sky grew bluer, was becoming dark, and the poles now
were absolutely solid. There was a sense – all the more palpable in such a remote and empty
place – of something gathering. Absence had given way to presence. We were in the midst of
what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience.”
Sources
Books
Baker, Kenneth, Minimalism: Art of Circumstance. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988
Meyer James, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001
Tate Gallery, Liverpool Minimalism (Catalog) 1989
Magazines
Dyer, Geoff, “Poles Apart,” New Yorker, April 18, 2011 pp. 62-70
Dyer and his wife traveled to New Mexico and Utah back country to see “The lightning Field”
and “Spiral Jetty.” To visit “The Lightning Field” people must travel in a group of six to the
remote site and stay overnight in the “kind of hut you see people inhabiting in photographs
from the nineteen thirties by Walker Evans.”
Schjeldahl, Peter, “Shapes of Things: After Kazimir Malevich,” New Yorker, March 14,
2011, pp. 76-7.
This is a review of the exhibition “Malevich and the American Legacy,” an exhibition in Spring
2011 at the uptown Gagosian gallery in NYC. “Kazimir Malevich was the first great artist to
make art look like something your kid could do – if your kid had thought of doing it in warisolated Moscow, in 1915, and was a genius.”
Online
Britannic Online
The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists
The Oxford Companion to Western Art
Wikipedia
Art shown
Walter De Maria, “Cage” 1961-65, in Meyer p. 20
Sol LeWitt, “Untitled” 1966, in Meyer p. 20
Donald Judd, “Untitled,” 1972, in Baker p. 59
Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty” in Baker p. 103 and April 18, 2011 New Yorker, p. 62
Walter De Maria, “The Lightning Field” in Baker p. 125