Alanna Spence
Minimalism Seminar
CCA April 2007
Painting as Object?
Monochrome or opaque paintings of the 1960s had much of the same intentions as Minimalist sculpture of the same time. These paintings sought to remove illusionism from painting. The monochromatic paintings of this period employed flat, buy unembellished surfaces of uniform muted colors. There is nothing lifelike in these paintings. They are painting as painting, diagnosis surface as surface, drug art as art. Lippard and Crimp place Irwin, Mangold, Hunphrey, Marden, Novros, and Ryman in this category of monochrome or opaque paintings.
Like Minimalism sculpture, there is some interest in phenomenology, but on a slightly different scale and relationship. Canvas size is chosen in relation to the human body. The sizes of the paintings are large, but not enormous like Newman’s were in the 1950s. Most paintings are between 8 and 12 feet, making the just large enough to envelope a person when they are no more than a few feet from the work. Unlike Newman’s paintings, which were intended to invoke a sensation of infinite space, these paintings are meant to facilitate an intimate one-on-one conversation between viewer and painting. The viewer is made more aware of his/her own space.
The paintings are described as existing in both time and space because they demand more time and concentration than more illusionist art. The artist’s intention is often to place the viewer into a state of forced contemplation. The viewer is absorbed into the ambiguous, atmospheric space of the painting. Monochrome paintings ask for a level of commitment from its viewers that is uncommon in a time of instant culture and gratification. The artists hope to evoke a contemplative, hypnotic, or meditative state in the viewer. This state cannot be reached with illusionistic art because we are constantly interpreting the work, our consciousness is absorbed by it. With monochrome or “empty” art, we are free from content; the work can exist on its own. After spending time with the painting, the viewer begins to become aware of their own mental activity, they become aware of their awareness itself. The serial nature of the work strengthens this awareness. The viewer begins to tune into subtle relationships between different colors and shapes as they view each piece in a series.
The seeds of monochrome or opaque art were planted with works in the 1950s from Newman, Reinhardt, Rothko. Crimp considers Johns and Kelly to have also played roles in the development of opaque art. Although Johns was using imagery in his paintings, he was using them in an anti-illusionist manner. I believe what he is referring to was John’s use of newspaper and other media images in his work. The collage pieces are anti-illusionistic because Johns isn’t attempting to pass them off as anything other that clippings. Crimp felt that Kelly’s paintings were somewhat successful in their opaque, surface as surface qualities, but felt the use of pure colors and shaped canvases turned the paintings into symbolic representations of that color. What artists like Marden and Ryman have tried to achieve is to remove the idea of painting as picture and propel painting into its final, nature progression. Inspired by the works of Newman, Reinhardt, Rothko, and other abstract expressionist colorfield painters, they tried to take painting to the next step.