Alanna Spence
Minimalism Seminar
CCA 2007
Marcia Tucker Phenaumanology, Yvonne Rainer A Quasi Survey of some Minimalist tendencies…, Michael Fried Art and Objecthood
This weeks reading is about process art or art made by an interaction between the artists body and the audience. The three articles discuss the work of Rainer, Morris, and Nauman. It seems with this new wave, art is embracing aspects of dance and theatre, while dance is incorporating ideas of minimalism. Nauman and Morris take Phenomenology to a new level by removing the object completely and focusing the work directly on the human body and it’s interaction with the viewer.
Fried called this new work, literalist work. The work exists solely as artist performance or action and there is no physical object as a final piece. In Morris’s work, Fried talks about the Beholder as the subject and the piece as the object. Fried sees theatrical ties to the work in that it is duration based. The pieces are very aware of time and space, similar to theatrical work. In a painting or sculpture, all the actions, every moment of the work ends up as a single culmination of the work, one piece. Literalist work only exists in the duration of the piece.
Yvonne Rainer’s piece discusses similarities between minimalist art such as process of literalist art in modern dance. She examines her choreography as sharing characteristics of monimalist art such as minimalization of character, phrasing, variation in rhythm, climax. I don’t have a lot of personal reference to the type of dance she is referring to but I see a lot of similarities in minimalist music. I envision her dances involving a lot of repetition, texture, and layering.
Bruce Nauman uses sound, light, movement, temperature, and basic, everyday materials in his work. His work focuses on the experience of the piece and the viewers response to that experience. There is no focus on final product as an art object. His art is related to man’s nature. He likes to use everyday objects like telephones, the act of writing, and technology like computers. There are visual puns, verbal wordplay and the manipulation of these objects in an arranged environment. There is a physical involvement of the spectator in his work that you don’t find with static work. Once the viewer is made aware of the piece, they can’t get away from it. This demand of the artist on the viewer is something Fried touches on in his article about Objecthood. There was one piece, called Clown Torture, that consisted of several videotapes of clowns being tortured in various ways. The room where the videos play is filled with sounds and images that make the viewer feel like they are in the room with these clowns and it’s impossible to ignore their existence. It has been referred to as “an assault on the senses.”
Bruce Nauman was on Art 21, there are a few video clips of the show on the website. One part that I really liked about his interviews was that he never feels like an audience is an important part of his work, he thinks of things on a one-on-one scale. When he feels most successful when he makes something and would want to show it to a guest stopping by his house, like “hey, here’s this thing I made.” He feels like if the work can be successful on that individual level, it’s a good sign. This interest in focusing on the one-on-one intimacy of his work seems to have began in his earlier works and is a theme that has carried on. Fried also talks about the audience as one when discussing literalist art and artists like Morris.