Object and Content

Minimal art was a movement that appeared at the beginning of the 1960s, mainly in New York. It had a profound effect on the art of the decade and on the artistic styles that followed it. The lack of content in the works — the reduction of composition to a simple geometry — bewildered spectators and critics alike, and led to a flurry of philosophical speculation in leading art magazines and even philosophical journals.

Although the artists involved in this movement were not the first Americans to make severely abstract paintings and sculptures, they did not seem to share the philosophical base of those who preceded them — artists such as Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt, who were associated with the generation of the 1950s, and in particular with the Abstract Expressionists.

In a now historic interview on WBAI-FM radio, New York, in February 1964, artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd made statements which demonstrated their refusal to provide any meaning to what they were making beyond the experience of the works themselves. Stella described his work as:

Judd offered very little more than Stella in his description of his own work. Although much of his work relied on a repeated series of the same shape, he saw the parts as unrelated. He described the parts as one thing after another rather than speaking of the parts making up a whole.

Minimal works first gained wide media attention in a now famous exhibition entitled 'Primary Structures' held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966. The American and English artists represented in the exhibition questioned 'the function of the pedestal, the relationship of spectator and sculptural space and the choice of materials'.² Kynaston McShine, curator of the exhibition, pointed out that many of these works had several things in common, which he defined as 'architectural scale, their conception as "objects" and the influence of modern technology and industry'.³

The exhibition brought a handful of artists to the attention of the critics. These artists — Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin in particular — made up much of the core of a group that came to be called 'Minimal'. The term 'Minimal' was coined by philosopher-art writer Richard Wollheim, who used it to describe works that had 'a minimal art content: in that either they are to an extreme degree undifferentiated in themselves and therefore possess very low content of any kind, or else the differentiation that they do exhibit, which may in some cases be very considerable, comes not from the artist but from a non-artistic source, like nature or the factory'.⁴

Critics found that there was much more to say about the thinking which lay behind these works — and their execution — than about the works themselves. This was accentuated by the fact that many of the artists were also writers, which put them in an authoritative position to expound on their ideas. Critic Corinne Robins, reviewing the Primary Structures exhibition, questioned whether the works would still be regarded as important after their novelty wore off. She pointed out that much material written on these objects provided 'exhaustive lists of what the new works are not, lists which themselves have become a commentary on our primarily verbal, non-visual culture'.⁵

To understand these works, audiences needed an awareness of current criticism or recent developments in art. Even so, the visual similarities of Minimal compositions to the reductive forms of earlier formalist and geometric art provided only a partial explanation of their meaning. The suggestion that Minimal art was a reaction to the loaded brushstrokes and romantic gestures of the Abstract Expressionists was true in part, but there were other sources of inspiration.

New York critic Clement Greenberg identified one historical influence, that of artist Marcel Duchamp (1887—1968). Duchamp's concept of using found objects (the readymade) to make works of art reappeared in the fluorescent fittings that Dan Flavin employed in his sculptures and in the compositions Robert Morris produced with batteries, light bulbs, files and other objects. This interest in the readymade reflected a need to re-define established distinctions between art and non-art — an issue presented in the works of Carl Andre.

Duchamp's readymades were objects found in the urban environment, for instance, hat racks, bicycle wheels and bottle-drying racks. Objects of no intrinsic artistic value were presented as art, thus challenging accepted notions about the nature of art. Similarly, Andre often used found materials like firebricks or railroad ties to make 'sculptures' that were not physically joined in any way. When the exhibition of these works was finished, Andre would merely return the materials to their source. Firebricks became firebricks again when they were returned to the brick pile, and railroad ties were merely railroad ties when disassembled by the artist. In the latter state the materials had no artistic value; it was only Andre's arrangements that rendered them 'art'.

Another influence was the works and presence of composer-performer-artist-philosopher John Cage, who helped point the way towards stark works and empty forms. One of Cage's musical compositions, 4' 33", a work lasting four minutes and thirty-three seconds, was performed by a pianist who sat at a piano without playing a note. The 'piece' consisted of all the incidental sounds in the auditorium. Thus the 'piece' and its perception as a lay outside the focus of performance, much like the transference of meaning or legitimacy from the work to the realm of the viewer in Duchamp's readymades. Even more relevant is the relationship of Cage's performance to the experience of Ad Reinhardt's black paintings. Like Cage's musical compositions, the black paintings provide a contemplative surface which reflects back onto the viewer, placing the experience in the viewer's own space. Cage was also to encourage the merging of art and performance — a tradition that was to continue through the 1960s.

Performance provides a key to the works of Robert Morris. In 1961 he produced a performance piece employing a wooden rectangular column that stood for three and one-half minutes, then was lowered to the ground to lie prone for an equal amount of time. The nature of the object was thus transformed by its relative position. In 1964 Morris held an exhibition at Green Gallery in New York in which he presented spaces filled with grey painted geometrical constructions. One piece entitled Slab (cloud) was suspended from the ceiling so that it hovered at eye-level. Another identical Slab sat on the ground differentiating itself from (cloud) merely by its position and its relation to the viewer. The role of position in these pieces implies that the meaning of the work partly lies in the way in which the viewer relates to the placement of the work in the confines of the gallery. As a result, the environment itself becomes an element of the piece.

A number of Minimal artists were also interested in setting up systems or conceptual arrangements of rules that could be followed to the letter. The result was often either a series of related forms or the concrete manifestation of some conceptual structure. The large, lattice-like structures that Sol LeWitt produced in the 1960s exemplify this approach, each being conceived as a two-dimensional structure and realised as the simple arithmetic build-up of a single modular uni. Nevertheless, in their three-dimensional form these pieces present a surprisingly visual complexity, accentuated by the shadows they cast. LeWitt claimed that in conceiving the white lattice-work pieces he was interested in what would come out of his ideas about Seurat and Mondrian.⁶

Tho unexpected visual complexity that often results from the realization of a structured concept can be seen in this exhibition. Thus, although the titles of LeWitt's sculpture, drawing and prints all faithfully reflect his idea, the works themselves display other qualities. For example, the title Grids using straight, not straight and broken lines in yellow, red & blue and all their combinations, 1975, truly describes this etching, but it does not oven hint at the variety and visual interest that is aroused by a very limited set of conditions. In execution, the dead-pan descriptors become a lyrical reality based on the structure and the limited variations in the grid.

Interest in seriality and repetition in art was a reflection of an industrial society that mass-produced its images. Andy Warhol at much the same time mimicked machine-made images by producing multiple photo-silkscreens of publicity stills of celebrities or dead-pan renderings of consumer products. The module and the use of it in serial progression appears also in Dan Flavin's industrially-manufactured, fluorescent fittings. In the 1960s the industrial age was being replaced by the information age the age of the computer. This meant a transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. While LeWitt's sculptural work looks machine-made, his wall drawings evoke systems that echo cybernetic counterparts, thus marking the crossover from module to system.

The repetition of images also has the effect of rendering a form or composition neutral. The cage-like forms of LeWitt, like the grids of Agnes Martin, seem to be, for all their rigidity and architectural appearance, really about the move away from structured focal points. That is, the very repetition of the module allows the structure to fall away as it is contemplated, becoming merely a visual matrix on which to rest the eyes.

Several artists stated that the purpose of these blank, architectonic forms, monochrome canvases and simple geometric arrangements was to remove content as we think of it from the art work. Since there was no 'subject' to provide meaning, the viewer could experience the piece directly without such things as subject or narrative getting in the way. There was already a model for this kind of experience in the works of Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin. Although in age and activity both artists were contemporaries of the Abstract Expressionists, the rigid monochromatic arrangements of Reinhardt and the delicate, pencilled grids of Martin bore no visible relation to the painterly works of these 'action painters'. Visually they anticipate the work that was to follow in the 1960s: their spare canvases sit nicely with the works of the Minimal artists.

The meditative qualities of both Reinhardt's and Martin's works provide a clue to the experience of Minimal art. Their interest in oriental philosophies, especially Zen Buddhism, is carried through to their works, Reinhardt's monoforms and Martin's shimmering grids and stripes provide a matrix that visually holds the eye and at the same time induces a contemplative mood. There is little surprise in hearing that critics compared Martin's grids to tantric yantras – grids which wore symbolic representations of the universe – Reinhardt’s black paintings to blank mandalas upon which meditational thought-chants could be projected. These concerns not only provide a Iine of meaning for Minimal works but also reveal a spiritual dimension that was often ignored in favour of the more political pronouncements of the artists and their critics in the 1960s.

It is interesting that Zen Buddhism was seen as an influence in the philosophy of the Abstract Expressionists, but not recognized as important to the Minimal artists. Yet Carl Andre attested to listening to Alan Watts's radio lectures on Zen in the 1950s⁷ and Reinhardt shared his interest in Zen Buddhism with his friend Thomas Merton, one of the principal writers on the subject in English. After he studied with Zen authority Dr D.T. Suzuki at Columbia University, Reinhardt in turn taught oriental studies to Robert Morris.

The critics of the time did not ascribe the influence of Zen to Minimal art because the links were not obvious. The interpretation given to Zen by the Abstract Expressionists, for example, was not of interest to the Minimal artists. There is no trace of the spontaneous gesture in Minimal art, but there is a great deal of emphasis on absolute objectivity, being-in-itself and the experience of the timeless within the present.

The fact that Minimal works of art are often not perceived as having a spiritual content has affected the way in which they are assessed. On purely formal grounds, they run the risk of being dismissed as trivial if held up to the concept of 'high art’. Yet, as Barbara Rose points out in describing Reinhardt’s contribution to Minimal art, what is missing in the usual analysis of this movement is 'the realization that high art can only endure as spiritual art…’.⁸

The meaning of Minimal art can be discussed in terms other than formalist. From the perspective of the 1990s, it is apparent that 'what we see is what we see', but that this is both far simpler and far more complex than it first appeared. Such a realization confirms the 'spiritual' element in Minimal art.

Alan R. Dodge