Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties: . - Review of books: what it meant to be minimal - book review

Art in America, Jan, 2002 by Pepe Karmel

Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, by James Meyer, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 2001; 340 pages, $50.

Back in 1994, curator Lynn Zelevansky noted that "Minimalism ... has a place in the second half of our century akin to the one held by Cubism in the first half." (1) Yet Minimalism has proven curiously hard to define. There is a short list of artists--Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre--whose early work, created and exhibited between 1961 and 1965, seems to announce the emergence of a distinctive new style. The problem is defining what these artists had in common and which other artists should be included with them. Until now, the critical literature on Minimalism has offered mostly unsatisfactory answers to these questions. (2)

There are countless books, catalogues and articles devoted to individual Minimalists but surprisingly few that discuss the movement as a whole. Even today, the essential reference in the field is still Gregory Battcock's Minimalism: A Critical Anthology, published in 1968. (3) This was followed, 20 years later, by Kenneth Baker's Minimalism: Art of Circumstance. In this concise survey, Baker chronicles the development of the movement, discusses its consequences for later art, and offers a series of idiosyncratic, poetic insights. Frances Colpitt's Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective, from 1990, is a more scholarly study, dividing the critical response to Minimalism into four large categories: "Process Issues," "Internal Issues: Composition," "External Issues: The Spectator" and "Theoretical Issues." Despite the acuity of Colpitt's analyses, the artists and their work tend to disappear within the ornate intellectual edifice erected around them. Edward Strickland's Minimalism: Origins, published in 1993, gives surprisingly short shrift to the Minimalists of the 1960s. Declaring that "if Reinhardt's ... work does not qualify as Minimalist, the term has little meaning," Strickland devotes the first 100 pages of his book to a discussion of Rauschenberg, Fontana, Klein, Reinhardt, Newman, Stella and other painters; the next 140 to an account of the "Minimalist" composers La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass; and just 20 pages to Judd, Morris and their peers. Only rarely does Strickland connect musical and visual Minimalism, as when he compares the "modular repetition" of Terry Riley's compositions to the "serial forms" of Stella and Judd. (4)

Apart from Battcock's anthology, the most influential discussions of Minimalism have taken the form of essays in journals or catalogues. Rosalind Krauss's 1973 essay "Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post '60s Sculpture" and its 1974 sequel, "Line as Language," sum up the literary and philosophical ideas associated with Minimalism in the mid-1960s--a melange of Wittgenstein, Robbe-Grillet and Merleau-Ponty--and synthesize them into a powerful argument that the defining feature of Minimalism is its metaphorical rejection of psychological interiority. This has become more or less the canonical view of the subject. (5) Anna Chave offers a very different view in her 1990 essay "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power," which notes the affinities between the formal language of Minimalism and the visual vocabulary of the American military-industrial complex, arguing that, despite its rebellious facade, Minimalism was essentially an expression of oppressive patriarchal values. (6) Chave's view has become canonical in its own way: every subsequent writer has felt compelled to disagree with her.

Finally, just last year, James Meyer published a useful survey, Minimalism, as part of Phaidon's "Themes and Movements" series. Heavily illustrated, it offers a condensed account of the movement's development along with a 100-page anthology of earlier critical texts, providing a greatly needed supplement to Battcock's 1968 anthology. The real news, however, is the recent publication of Meyer's more detailed study, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties.

This new volume combines a sophisticated reading of the critical discourse surrounding Minimalism with a step-by-step history of the work's development and its appearance on the public stage from 1961 through 1968. Meyer frames his project by defining Minimalism as "a field of difference," a combination of various positions corresponding to names such as: "Andre," "Flavin," "Judd," "LeWitt" and "Morris." This is a polemical list, intended to acknowledge not only the significant differences among the founders of Minimalism, but also the degree to which Minimalism was defined by opponents such as Clement Greenberg--who argued, quasi-facetiously, that Anne Truitt's painted wood constructions of the early 1960s were really the first Minimalist sculptures. "Truitt" thus becomes one of Meyer's many defining terms.

"Precisely because [minimalist work] barely registered as art to some observers, the objects of Morris, Judd, and others required considerable justification," Meyer notes. The artists themselves produced criticism of remarkable complexity, and inspired brilliant polemics from both supporters and opponents. Much of this material was reproduced in Battcock's anthology--but it was printed in alphabetical order, by author. Meyer tremendously clarifies the arguments over Minimalism simply by discussing these essays in chronological order. (7)