Alanna Spence
Minimalism Seminar
CCA 2007
Stella, Judd, Sontag
The three articles covered this week all spoke about the main themes or trends shared by many works of early minimalism or modernism. These similarities included simplification of form and content into the purest or most clear idea. Much of the work focused on emphasizing the form and accentuating the materials in 3D works or pictorial structure in paintings. At the time, these were very new directions for art. The artists tended to share a common belief that they were breaking out of age-old assumptions and assumptions about painting and sculpture. There was a desire to eliminate the need for interpretation. They felt if a work could be boiled down to it’s essential parts, it could stand alone without the need for content or interpretation. The work would just be exactly what it is, and nothing more.
Stella derives the form for his paintings through the shape of his canvases. His brush strokes follow the edge of the canvas, all the way into the center. The width of the stroke is determined by the width of the brush he uses. There is an emphasis on flatness and the paint’s relationship to the framing edge of the canvas. Stella often worked in series. He focuses on formal aspects such as picture structure or paint medium across an entire series, and not as much on the “artists’s hand” in the work. He experimented with different shapes of canvas, and introduced cut outs in the centers of canvases. In Michael Fried’s excerpt about Stella’s work, he argues that working in series can be seen as a defense against the risks of interpretation in works of art that have little or no content to interpret. We are used to judging art by its subject matter, and by working in series, Stella eliminates the risk of his audience judging a single work as being arbitrary and meaningless. By working in series, you highlight the formal and expressive qualities of the work.
In Meyer’s Minimalism, Judd talks about the differences between three dimensional work, painting and sculpture. The new work that he is speaking about, he feels does not fit into any movement, style or school. He feels that a linear history of art is unraveling with modernist trends. Separate art movements don’t make sense any more. He is talking about the excitement of moving away from traditional mediums like oil and canvas. Industrial materials are more impactful and because they have not been used much in art, and have tremendous possibilities. Any material can be used, it just has to be interesting. He talks about paintings always being an illusion of space. There are few painters who have achieved unspacial or nearly unspacial paintings. Three-dimensional art is ‘real space’ and therefore isn’t illusionist.
Sontag talks about how our understanding of art comes from theories developed during Greek times. This western view of art assumes art is trying to imitate real life. This immediately sets up a challenge for any work of art to have to justify itself. Content of a work of art has much more weight that form. Therefore, it’s assumed that art has to be saying something. Interpreting works of art rob them of their gift. Modern painting tried to avoid interpretation by having no content. By simplifying form and color, the work escapes interpretation. It simply is what it is. She suggests we start judging works of art by different measurements. We need to spend more time on formal analysis and less time on trying to interpret meaning. We should focus on observant descriptions of the appearance of works. And lastly, she makes a point that redundancy is the “principle affliction” of art.
All three of the articles for this week’s readings have common themes of simplification or purification of concept, a marrying of techniques, mediums, and surfaces into one cohesive art object, and of moving away from content-based work into formal based work. These themes can be thought of as the basic components of minimalist art and movements that followed it.