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,
Agnes Martin,
Robert Morris, and
Frank Stella. 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 terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music which
features repetition and iteration, as in the compositions of
Steve Reich,
La Monte Young,
Philip Glass,
John Adams, and
Terry Riley. (See also
Postminimalism).
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 and
novels of
Samuel
Beckett, the films of
Robert
Bresson, the stories of
Raymond
Carver, and even the automobile designs of
Colin Chapman.
Minimalist music
- See Minimalist music for a
full discussion.
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 of
De Stijl artists is a
major source of reference for 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 tactic of arranging the numerous necessary components of
a building to create an impression of extreme simplicity, by
enlisting every element and detail to serve multiple visual and
functional purposes (such as designing a floor to also serve as the
radiator, or a massive fireplace to also house the bathroom).
Designer
Buckminster Fuller
adopted the engineer's goal of "Doing more with less", but his
concerns were oriented towards technology and engineering rather
than aesthetics. A similar sentiment was industrial designer
Dieter Rams' motto, "Less but better",
adapted from van der Rohe. The structure uses relatively simple
elegant designs. The structure's beauty is also determined by
playing with lighting, using the basic geometric shapes as
outlines, using only a single shape or a small number of like
shapes for components for design unity, using tasteful non-fussy
bright color combinations, usually natural textures and colors, and
clean and fine finishes. Using sometimes the beauty of natural
patterns on stone and wood encapsulated within ordered simplified
structures. May use color brightness balance and contrast between
surface colors to improve visual aesthetics. The structure would
usually have industrial and space age style utilities (lamps,
stoves, stairs, etcetera), neat and straight components (like walls
or stairs) that appear to be machined with machines, flat or nearly
flat roofs, pleasing negative spaces, and large windows. This and
science fiction may have contributed to the late twentieth century
futuristic architecture design, and modern home decor. Modern
minimalist home architecture with its unnecessary internal walls
removed may have led to the popularity of the open plan kitchen and
living room style. Highly copied due to its quality finishes,
simple beauty, bright interior lighting and spacious living
room.
Another modern master who exemplifies reductivist ideas is
Luis Barragán. In minimalism, the
architectural designers pay special attention to the connection
between perfect planes, elegant lighting, and careful consideration
of the void spaces left by the removal of three-dimensional shapes
from an architectural design. The more attractive looking
minimalist home designs are not truly minimalist, because these use
more expensive building materials and finishes, and are relatively
larger.
Contemporary architects working in this tradition include
John Pawson,
Eduardo Souto de Moura,
Álvaro Siza Vieira,
Tadao Ando,
Alberto Campo Baeza,
Yoshio Taniguchi,
Peter Zumthor,
Hugh Newell Jacobsen,
Vincent Van Duysen,
Claudio Silvestrin,
Michael Gabellini, and
Richard Gluckman.
Minimalism in visual art
Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as
literalist art and
ABC Art
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
Expressionist, Minimalists were influenced by composers
John Cage and
LaMonte Young, poet
William Carlos Williams, and the
landscape architect
Frederick Law
Olmsted. They very explicitly stated that their art was not
self-expression, in opposition to the previous decade's Abstract
Expressionists. In general, Minimalism's features included:
geometric, often
cubic
forms purged of much
metaphor, equality of
parts,
repetition, neutral surfaces, and
industrial materials.
Robert Morris, an influential
theorist and artist, wrote a three part essay, "Notes on Sculpture
1-3", originally published across three issues of
Artforum
in 1966. In these essays, Morris attempted to define a conceptual
framework and formal elements for himself and one that would
embrace the practices of his contemporaries. These essays paid
great attention to the idea of the
gestalt - "parts... bound together in
such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual
separation." Morris later described an art represented by a "marked
lateral spread and no regularized units or symmetrical
intervals..." in "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects", originally
published in
Artforum, 1969,
continuing to say that "indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a
literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing." The general
shift in theory of which this essay is an expression suggests the
transitions into what would later be referred to as
Postminimalism.
One of the
first artists specifically associated with Minimalism was the
painter, Frank Stella, whose early
"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, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed
from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which
the canvas was stretched. The decisions about structures on the
front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective,
but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical
construction of the support. 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 energy-filled
and apparently highly subjective and emotionally-charged paintings
of
Willem de Kooning or
Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the
previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward
less gestural, often somber coloristic field paintings of
Barnett Newman and
Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate
attention from the MOMA show, artists like
Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey,
Robert Motherwell and
Robert Ryman had begun to explore stripes,
monochromatic and
Hard-edge formats from the late 50s
through the 1960s.
Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial,
illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a
movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns.
Donald Judd had started as a painter,
and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific
Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of
theory for the formation of Minimalist aesthetics. In this essay,
Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art,
and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European
artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the
works of an array of artists active in New York at the time,
including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of
"preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George
Ortman
[3299], who had concretized and distilled
painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged
geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then
comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the
categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and
that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar
conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.
In a much more broad and general sense, one might, in fact, find
European roots of Minimalism in the
geometric abstractions painters in the
Bauhaus, in the works of
Piet Mondrian and other artists associated
with the movement DeStijl, in
Russian Constructivists and in the work
of the Romanian sculptor
Constantin Brâncuşi.
This movement was heavily criticised by high modernist formalist
art critics and historians. Some anxious critics thought Minimalist
art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of
painting and sculpture as defined by critic
Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant
American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s.
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, particularly Minimalist
sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the
spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the
act of viewing into a type of
spectacle,
in which the artifice of the act
observation and the viewer's
participation in the work were unveiled.
Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an
aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as
a failure of Minimal art. 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."
Other Minimalist artists include:
Richard Allen,
Walter Darby Bannard,
Larry Bell, Ronald Bladen,
Mel Bochner,
Norman
Carlberg,
Erwin Hauer,
Dan Flavin,
Sol LeWitt,
Brice Marden,
Agnes Martin,
Jo Baer,
John McCracken, Paul Mogensen, David
Novros,
Ad Reinhardt,
Fred Sandback,
Richard Serra,
Tony Smith,
Robert Smithson, and
Anne Truitt.
Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the
Abstract Expressionist
generation, but one whose
reductive nearly
all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to
say about the value of a reductive approach to art:"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."
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.
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
Metafiction 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,
K. J. Stevens,
Amy Hempel,
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, early
Ezra Pound,
Robert Creeley,
Robert Grenier, and
Aram Saroyan are sometimes identified with
their
minimalist style. The term "minimalism" is also
sometimes associated with the briefest of poetic genres,
haiku, which originated in Japan but has been
domesticated in English literature by poets such as
Nick Virgilio,
Raymond Roseliep, and
George Swede.
The Irish author
Samuel Beckett is
also known for his minimalist plays and prose, as is the Norwegian
writer
Jon Fosse.
Minimalism in technical communication
Minimalism in
structured writing
or
topic-based authoring is
based on the ideas of
John Carroll. Like
Robert E. Horn's work on
Information Mapping, John Carroll's
principles of Minimalism were based in part on cognitive studies
and learning research at Harvard and Columbia University, by
Jerome Bruner,
Jerome Kagan,
B.F.
Skinner,
George A. Miller, and others.
Carroll argued that training materials should be constructed as
short task-oriented chunks, not lengthy monolithic user manuals
that explain everything in a long narrative fashion. He observed
that modern users are often already familiar with much of what is
described in the typical long manual. What they need is the
information to solve the particular task at hand. They should be
encouraged to do them with a minimum of systematic
instruction.
The historian of technical communication
R. John
Brockmann points out that task orientation had been enunciated
as a principle a decade earlier at IBM by Fred Bethke and others in
a report on IBM Publishing Guidelines.
Darwin
Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is built on Carroll's
theories of Minimalism and Horn's theories of Information
Mapping.
Minimalism is a large part of
JoAnn
Hackos' recent workshops and books on information development
using structured writing and the DITA
XML
standard.
Minimalism in film
Footnotes
- Holm, Ivar (2006). Ideas and Beliefs in Architecture and
Industrial design: How attitudes, orientations, and underlying
assumptions shape the built environment. Oslo School of
Architecture and Design. ISBN 8254701741.
- Fried, M. "Art and Objecthood", Artforum, 1967
- Rose, B. "ABC Art", Art in America, 1965.
-
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/384056/minimalism
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