Minimalism
In 1913 Kasimir Malevich placed a black square on a white ground and called it Òthe voidÓ.

In 1914 Marcel Duchamp exhibited the metal bottle-rack, and for half a century these marked the limits of visual art; they were renunciations of former limits.

Malevich renounced the notion that art had to be complex, and Duchamp showed that he could make an Ôart-work' just by choosing one ready made object from a host of others, so making it unique, like any other art object. 

Barbara Rose said that, Òthese works were a formal reaction to the excesses of painterliness.  The simple denial of content can in itself constitute the content.Ó

Minimal art was just another stage in art history, with its roots in Non-Art and Dada.  Robert Morris' work displays Duchampian characteristics – SLIDE 5 ÒCARD FILEÓ, SLIDE 8 ÒMETERED BULBÓ.

His works and ideas have helped to delineate a variety of problems inherent in Minimal Sculpture: these are viewer participation, size, scale, surface and gestalt.  The word Gestalt means, Òa perceived organized whole that is more than the sum of its partsÓ; and it is this that has to be defined in minimalist work.

Robert Morris' case against painting is merely this, Òthe primary problematic concerns with which advanced painting have been occupied for about half a century have been structural.  The structural element has gradually been revealed to lie within the literal qualities of the support.  It has been a long dialogue with a limit.  Sculpture, never having been concerned with illusionism, could not possibly have based the efforts of 50 years on the pious and contradictory act of giving up illusionism and approaching the object.Ó

Michael Fried continues: ÒA form can be used only in so many ways – the rectangular plan is given a life-span.  The simplicity required to emphasize the rectangle, limits the arrangements possible within it.  Shaped canvases merely prolong this.  So the single plane was given up for 3 Dimension, as actual space is more powerful than paint on a flat surface.Ó  SLIDES 34 AND 25, JUDD 7,9,12,13,14

This was an inevitable move, as painting has nothing to offer in the minimalist field, a painting is dependent on illusion, if it is not to become an object.

If we think about the problems of minimal sculpture it may be easier for you to followif we isolate them,: it is difficult to isolate them, as they are totally interdependent.  However: -

SHAPE

SLIDES 22, 23, variable arrangement, 24 variant arrangement 4 pieces.

Complex irregular polyhedrons like a crystal formation are not used because they can frustrate visualisation almost completely and it is difficult to maintain that one is experiencing a gestalt. 

Robert Morris uses these unitary forms Òwhich are simple, regular and irregular polyhedrons. Simplicity of shape does not necessarily mean that a simple experience is promoted.  Unitary forms order, not reduce, relationships.

He believes the multipart inflected formats of past sculpture are /SLIDE 11 & corner piece/ extraneous when compared with minimal work, which magnifies the single most important sculptural value – shape.

SIZE

Minimal work has not the size of the monument or the ornament, much of it presents an image neither of figurative nor architectonic reference, so the works have been described as ÒstructureÓ or ÒobjectsÓ. In order to experience the gestalt the sculptures have to be quite a distance from the onlooker on a non-personal, public scale, physical participation is sometimes necessary.  (Pin up poster of R.M.'s work), SLIDES 32, 4, 17.

Literal space and the existing light are included into the whole experience, the space of a room is itself a structuring factor, but he says that the ideal space is without architecture as a background and reference.  SLIDES 33,21, 18, Donald Judd SLIDE.

Robert Morris shows no concern for intimate detail.  He feels it is negative as it separates the whole, in the same way that separate specific elements within one work do.  Every internal relationship reduces the public external quality of the object and tends to eliminate the viewer to the degree that these details pull him into an intimate relation with the work and out of the space in which the object exists.  SLIDE 46 SMITH Circle II.  This also goes for intense colour, specific sensuous material, impressively high finishes and personal traces that the artist might leave behind, such as finger marks.

He is also against the use of mathematical or engineering concerns to generate images.  He thinks it has a pretentious intimacy.  (But he excludes Jasper Johns here).  It is the cubist aesthetic of having reasonableness or logic for relating parts that is opposite to his theory.

GESTALT

Relationships are taken out of the work, and it is made a function of space, light and the viewers' field of vision.  It is the relationship between the viewer and the work that is exaggerated.  The viewer changes the shape of the object constantly by the change in his position relative to the work.  POSTER.  It is the strength of the constantly known shape – the gestalt – that allows this awareness to become so much more emphatic in these works than in previous sculpture.  The apprehension of the gestalt is the only immediate experience.  The experience of the work necessarily exists in time, for as long as the viewer is there.  The intention is diametrically opposed to Cubism because it is not concerned with simultaneous views in one plane.  The sensuous object with compressed internal relations has thus been rejected by the minimalists. 

They are also terms ÒLiteralists' by Michael Fried SLIDES 20,38,27,26,39,28,40,41.

Like shape, materials are what they are, and nothing more, says Michael Fried; the material is allowed to confront in all its literalness and objectivity.  It has nothing other than itself.

The sculptor TONY SMITH made a cube which could be said to be inexhaustible, it is always of further interest, but that's because there is nothing there to exhaust.  The minimal artists seek to objectify this kind of endlessness of experience in their work.  The beholder is supposed to be made aware of the endlessness and inexhaustibility of his experience in time.

Tony Smith said ÒAll art today is an art of postage stampsÓ – it is circumscribed, and conventional.  There is no way to frame an experience thus making a work of art of it, - you just have to experience it.

The minimalist has made it possible to see a work of art as nothing more that an object, and an object which is a contributing factor, although not subordinate, to a whole experience.  JUDD.22. The object has become less self important, and it takes its place among others, hopefully not as some bland, neutral generalized retiring shape. 

SLIDE of DON. JUDD repetitive work.  Robert Morris says  Òsome of the new work, which generates image so readily by innumerably repetitive modular units, does bog down in a form of neutrality.  Such work becomes dominated by its own means through JUDD 5 the overbearing visibility of the modular unitÓ.

Now that you've got an idea of what Minimalism is concerned with we can take a look at the reception the critics give the New Sensibility, termed Minimalism, ABC Art, Primary Structure, Specific Objects, and Literalist work.

The Minimalists believed that they had established new limits and freedom for sculpture by their magnification of simplicity and have given the critics a hard time.  They say that it is beyond analysis.

I think this is because it states the obvious, which is not obvious.  They are just stating truths, and these can hardly be criticised.

Robert Morris says that it is not surprising that some of the new sculpture that avoids varying parts has been called negative, boring, and nihilistic.  These judgements arise from confronting the work with expectations structured by a cubist aesthetic in which what is to be had from the work is located simply within the specific object.  The situation is now more complex and expandedÓ, he says damningly.

Clement Greenberg, the first to analyse the Ôpresence' of Minimal art says that Minimal works are readable SLIDE 3 as art as almost anything is today –including a door, a table, or a blank sheet of paper.  Yet it would seem that a kind of art nearer the condition of non-art could not beÓ.

Michael Fried treats the question more seriously – finding the Minimalist sensibility hollow by its emphasis on shape.

What he means by hollow is perhaps meant also in the literal sense for he says that Tony Smith's biomorphic pneumatic structures Òreveal something about what Ôhollowness' means in Minimal ArtÓ.  ÒAll the material is in tension and the resulting biomorphic forms have a dream-like qualityÓ.

Samuel Wagstaff Junior says that the hollow pieces of Morris and Judd have an inner secret life.  SLIDE 24,19, 25.

Fried also maintains that Minimalist sensibility is corrupted by theatre.  The theatre is at odds with art.  It exists for an audience and Minimal work bears a relation in that it exists for the beholders when experiencing it. It is almost as though the work has been awaiting you, it depends on you, it isolates, confronts and distances you.  The non-personal, public mode distances you psychically and physically.  The distancing makes you a subject and the piece an object so you tend to look at your own experience.  To defeat theatricality, the object, not oneself, must remain the focus of the situation, but as the situation belongs to the beholder, one naturally has to think of oneself.  Samuel Wagstaff Junior feels that in this way the Minimalist bases his production of an experience on nature, it become similar to a confrontation between 2 beings.  SLIDE 4 1-box.  But surely, simplification is an easy way out, not a return to fundamentals  ---?

SLIDE 1  The ideas seem more important than the actual physical products.  ÒHow we perceive it becomes more important than what it isÓ.

This essay was given as an illustrated talk by Jane Ostler in March 1979 at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, Wiltshire as part of her first year painting art history studies.