MINIMILIST ART
Frank Stella
Stella's instantly acclaimed 1958 Minimalist paintings contrasted Abstract Expressionism's
emotional canvases.
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Stella was an early advocate of making non-representational paintings, rather than
artwork that alluded to underlying meanings, emotions or narratives. He wanted his
audiences to appreciate color, shape and structure alone.
Stella challenged the very notion of a painting by declaring his flat canvases, structured
reliefs, metal protrusions and freestanding sculptures all to be paintings. "A sculpture is
just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.''
Trips to New York galleries exposed Stella to artists such as Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline and
particularly Jasper Johns. Johns' geometric paintings of flags and targets inspired Stella's work
during his Princeton years.
His work utilized a monochromatic palette and flat surfaces
It signaled a break from the thick, textural paint and gestural compositions of the Abstract
Expressionists.
Stella famously called a painting "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more," which
demonstrated his view of art as an object in itself, rather than a representation of something
emotional, intellectual or physical.
With their emphasis on form, not content, his early paintings are often credited with helping to
establish the Minimalist artistic movement.
For his first major works, the stark "Black Paintings" (1958-1960), Stella covered canvases with
black house paint, leaving unpainted pinstripes in repetitive, parallel patterns.
At only 23 years old, he gained instant recognition for these intense paintings. The MoMA
included four in its 1959-1960 Sixteen Americans exhibition and purchased one for the
permanent collection.
From his Black Paintings, Stella moved onto the Aluminum Paintings (1960) and the Copper
Paintings (1960-1961), for which he created his own geometrically shaped canvases,
challenging the traditional rectangular structure.
Much of his work at this time drew on the stripe motif begun with the Black Paintings, but he
soon expanded to brighter colors and worked complex circular forms into his compositions
During this period, Stella also began delving into printmaking, an aspect of his work he
passionately pursued throughout his career.
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Supper at Emmaus, 1622-1623
Frank Stella, Empress of India, 1965
One day while the show “Three American Painters” was hanging at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, Michael Fried and
I were standing in one of the galleris. To our right was a copper painting by Frank Stella, its surface burnished by
the light which flooded the room. A Harvard student who had entered the gallery approached us. With his left arm
raised and his finger pointing to the Stella, he confronted Michael Fried. “What’s so good about that?” he
demanded. Fried looked back at him. “Look,” he said slowly, “there are days when Stella goes to the Metropolitan
Museum. And he sits for hours looking at the Velázquez, utterly knocked out by them and then he goes back to his
studio. What he would like more than anything else is to paint like Velázquez. But what he knows is that that is an
option that is not open to him. So he paints stripes.” Fried’s voice had risen. “He wants to be Velázquez so he
paints stripes. He had tried to make the student think about one piece of the obvious: that Stella’s need to say
something through his art was the same as a seventeenth-century Spaniard’s; only the point in time was
different. —Rosalind
Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” Artforum, September 1972
Black painting
Carl Andre
Carl Andre was one of the founders of the art movement known as Minimalism. It is an art that
seeks to eliminate everything decorative, extraneous and additive, reducing all components to
art's purest elements; it is precise, cerebral and austere rather than accessible.
Andre once said that what was beautiful in art was "not that someone is original but that he
can find a way of creating in the world the instance of his temperament." His own
temperament is close to the tranquil philosophy of Taoism, and many critics refer to his work as
"pacific."
For his one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the artist set out eight rectangular
sculptures deployed on the gallery floor, each made of 120 bricks.
"One hundred twenty is the number richest in factors," Andre explained, "arithmetic is only the
scaffolding or armature of my work." Equivalent VIII, one of the eight works, was made two
bricks high, six across, and ten lengthwise (technically and sometimes referred to as "2 high x 6
header x 10 stretcher").
Placement, environment, and relativeness are important in all of this artist's works.
"A place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the
general environment more conspicuous," he said. "Everything is an environment, but a place is
related particularly to both the general qualities of the environment and the particular qualities
of the work which has been done." - cerebral
The bricks in Equivalent VIII are humble materials, basic to building, construction, and
manufacture; by treating these cubic, tesserae-units as sculpture, we begin to view the work's
physical reality as an esthetic phenomenon. And since placement generates and energizes the
piece, Equivalent VIII and its surrounding environment become one work of art.
Carl Andre works using commercially available materials or objects, almost always in identical
units or bar forms, such as timber, styrofoam, cement blocks, bales of hay, etc., with only one
type of material per work.
He considers the setting or placement an essential part of the work, and the form of each piece
is largely determined by the space for which it is constructed. "I don't think spaces are that
singular, I think there are generic classes of spaces. So it's not really a problem where a work is
going to be in particular. It's only a problem, in general, of the generic spaces: is it going to be
the size of Grand Central Station or is it going to be the size of a small room?"
The order which Carl Andre imposes on his materials is not designed to create an art object to be gazed
at, so much as to create a set of conditions which generates a perceptual response which we experience
as art.
Agnes Martin
Agnes Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was a Canadian-American painter, often referred
to as a minimalist, although she considered herself an abstract expressionist.
Her work is most closely associated with Taos, New Mexico, although she moved to New York City after
being discovered by the gallery owner Betty Parsons in 1957. Disillusioned with the art scene in New
York, she returned to New Mexico in 1967 and established herself as a hermit at the foot of the Sangre
de Cristo Mountains.
The bulk of her work is composed of square grids. While minimalist in form, these paintings were quite
different in spirit from those of her minimalist counterparts
she shied away from intellectualism, favoring the personal and spiritual. Many of her grids represent
Taoist reflections. Because of her work's added spiritual dimension, which became more and more
dominant after 1967, she preferred to be classified as an abstract expressionist.
She consciously distanced herself from the social life and publicity events that brought other artists into
the public eye. When she died at age 92, she was said to have not read a newspaper for the last 50
years.
She worked only in black, white, and brown before moving to New Mexico. During this time, she
introduced light pastel washes to her grids, colors that shimmered in the changing light.
Untitled, 1959
Tremolo, 1962
Morning, 1965
LANDSCAPE ART
-artists respond in different ways to the pressures of life in the contemporary world
- the best is designed to sensitize viewers to the qualities of the natural and urban areas around us. The
artists try to express hope for the future of humanity and the world – it’s called Earth art, Environmental
Art or Site art as well
Robert Smithson
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Used industrial construction equipment to move huge quantities of earth and rock on isolated
sites in order to express his ideas about the meanings of natural systems, geological time and
entropy
His first works were more temporary - on-location pieces that modified the landscape physically
or visually (pouring asphalt down a rock face, or placing mirrored plates throughout the space
Wanting to do something more permanent, he was attracted to a site on the Great Salt Lake in
Utah - Spiral Jetty
It is a vast coil of earth and stone that symbolized the reality of time, on a monumental scale, so
that it extended out into the lake
The idea grew from his first impression of the location: “As I looked at the site, it reverberated
out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire
landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a
spinning sensation without movement. The site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense
roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty”
Smithson tried to unify art and nature as he hoped to make his viewers feel the unity between
self and non-self.
The problems in working in this mode are in the accessibility of the work – it’s hard for people to
see it, so photography and the filming of the process became very important in the creation and
in the recording of the work itself as the jetty now lies underwater
Smithson died tragically in 1973 when a plane he was in to survey a site for a new earth
sculpture crashed near Amarillo, TX.
Christo
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He intensifies the viewer’s awareness of the space and features of natural and urban sites by
modifying parts of them with cloth
His pieces also incorporate the relationship between human social/political action, art and the
environment
Started by wrapping objects in clumsy wrappings to take bits of the real world into the
mysterious world of the unopened package whose contents can be seen dimly in silhouette
under the wrap
Constructed ambitious temporary installations by wrapping buildings, giant “air packages” and
over 1 million square feet of Australian coast
The land pieces required years of preparation, research and dozens of meetings with local
authorities and interested groups of citizens
Has always considered that the Site pieces include the lobbying activity and the visual
documentation that goes into them as well as the actual short-lived physical pieces themselves
Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami, FL for only 2 weeks in May of 1983, is typical of his
site work.
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11 man-made islands in the bay were surrounded by specially fabricated pink fabric following 2
years of preparation to gain the required permissions, assemble the troop of ordinary and
professional workers and raise the $3.2 million cost of the project (accomplished entirely
through the sale of preliminary drawings, collages and models of the piece made by Christo).
Huge crowds watched Chisto’s crews remove trash from the islands, anchor the cloth “cocoons”
in the island vegetation, then unfold the fabric to form skirts around the islands
Because the site pieces have the quality of spectacle, some critics have compared them to
Happenings, but the artist disagrees saying that Happenings are make believe situations.
“everything in my art is strongly literal. If three hundred people are used, it is not because we
want 300 people to play roles, but because we have work for them
Nancy Holt
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Nancy Holt is a key member of the Land Art movement, and a pioneer in conceptual and public
art. Her work deals with memory, perception, time and space and uses the natural environment
as both medium and subject, with a focus on the cyclical time of the universe, the daily axial
rotation of our planet Earth and its annual orbit around the sun.
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Through her work she also conveys an interest in land reclamation, turning otherwise useless
and abandoned areas of land into a public space and artwork. Holt says “I like building things
that last, which are not precious and protected. The work is subject to the vicissitudes of nature,
including human interactions.”
The Sun Tunnels, near the town of Lucin, Utah
Sun Tunnels consists of four concrete cylinders placed in an open "X" configuration
with 86' long diagonals and 50' between opposing pairs of pipes. Each pipe is 7 1/4"
thick, 18' long, with an outside diameter of 9' 2 1/2", an inside diameter of 8', and
weighs 22 tons. Cast in concrete on steel skeletons, the pipes were custom-made at
the U.S. Pipe Company in Pleasant Grove, Utah. They rest on virtually hidden
concrete foundations
which were cast in place.
The cylinders align with the
angles of the sun rising and
setting during the summer
and winter solstices
(around June 21 and
December 21). At winter
solstice, and about ten days
before and after, the sun
rises in the pipes facing SE
and NW, and is visible
through the two pipes
facing SW and NE at sunset.
During summer solstice,
and about ten days before
and after, the same
alignment of sun and pipe is observed in the pipes facing NE and SW at sunrise and
the NW and SE pipes at sunset.
Each tunnel also has holes cut into it in the exact configuration of one of four
constellations. The SW-facing pipe corresponds to Capricorn, NW to Draco, NE to
Perseus, and the SE pipe to Columbia. The holes are variously 7, 8, 9, and 10 inches in
diameter, relative to the magnitude of the star to which each corresponds. During
the day and periods of bright moonlight, light is cast in the configurations of the four
constellations on the insides of the pipes.
Only within Sun Tunnels is the vastness of the desert brought back to human scale. It
is not only more comfortable and less overwhelming inside the cylinders, but it is the
only way to escape the harsh sunlight since the surrounding concrete keeps the
temperature lower.
Maya Ying Lin
Lin was catapulted to prominence while a Yale undergraduate when her
magisterially simple design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
(completed 1982) won a national competition.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
When Maya Ying Lin designed the plan for this memorial, she was aware of the controversy of
the war it was remembering, but chose to concentrate instead on “the reality of war and...the
people who gave their lives” (Kleiner, 1008).
The black granite that laces the edge of a deep cut into the earth summons up dark images. Lin
says “I had an impulse to cut open the earth...an initial violence that in time would heal. The
grass would grow back, but the cut would remain,” showing that the war itself was a deep scar
that could never be completely healed (Kleiner, 1008).
The monument’s walkway delivers the feeling of descent to its viewers, as they walk deeper into
the slash in the earth and wall continues to grow taller and taller.
It is overwhelming, the names of the dead and missing, but in this same monument, elements of
positivity can be found. First, it is a place of remembrance, and the remembrance of heroes. It is
cathartic and healing, a place of solace and honor.
It evokes compassion and thought in its visitors and literally reflects the life that still walks the
earth in the polished walls of stone.
Lin successfully created “an interface between the world of the light and the quieter world
beyond the names” (Kleiner, 1007). This monument is not founded on the goal to “dictate
response” but instead “encourages personal exploration” (Kleiner, 1007).
PERFORMANCE ART
: a nontraditional art form often with political or topical themes that typically features a live
presentation to an audience or onlookers (as on a street) and draws on such arts as acting,
poetry, music, dance, or painting
Laurie Anderson
an American experimental performance artist and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in
a variety of experimental music and art rock styles.
Initially trained as a sculptor,[2] Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s.
Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance-art activities. She became
widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the
UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.[3]
Anderson has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows.
In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of
horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a sixfoot-long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds.[4]
She performed in New York through the 1970s. One of her most-cited performances, Duets on Ice, which
she conducted in New York and other cities around the world, involved her playing the violin along with
a recording while wearing ice skates with the blades frozen into a block of ice; the performance ended
only when the ice had melted away.
POST MODERNISM
A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy,
architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others.
Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or
objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality
is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the
mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason,
postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all
groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each
person.
In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into
being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually.
Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing
always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and
relative, rather than certain and universal.
Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles,
and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth
which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called
"modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all
principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own
principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states,
postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than
can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has
defined itself."
Gerhard Richter
Nearly all of Richter’s work demonstrates both illusionistic space that seems natural and the physical
activity and material of painting—as mutual interferences. For Richter, reality is the combination of new
attempts to understand—to represent; in his case, to paint—the world surrounding us.
Creates scores of photopaintings – by hand painting camera made portraits, interiors, landscapes and
Steiglitz like skies, he resolves the rivalry between painting and photography, abstraction and figuration
– an emancipation from enslavement to both modernist formalism and old-fashioned illusionism
In the late 1960s, began reacting against the photo paintings with a return to pure abstraction with a
series of heavily impastoed monochrome works called Gray Pictures
Pedestrians 1963
Untitled 1969
Romare Bearden
From the mid-1930s through 1960s, Bearden was a social worker with the New York City Department of
Social Services, working on his art at night and on weekends.
His success as an artist was recognized with his first solo exhibition in Harlem in 1940 and his first solo
show in Washington, DC, in 1944. Bearden was a prolific artist whose works were exhibited during his
lifetime throughout the United States and Europe. His collages, watercolors, oils, photomontages and
prints are imbued with visual metaphors from his past in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina,
Pittsburgh and Harlem and from a variety of historical, literary and musical sources.
Bearden was also a respected writer and an eloquent spokesman on artistic and social issues of the
day. Active in many arts organizations, in 1964 Bearden was appointed the first art director of the
newly established Harlem Cultural Council, a prominent African-American advocacy group.
Bearden was also one of the founding members of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970
and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972.
Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare
Bearden had a prolific and distinguished career. He experimented with many different mediums and
artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages, two of which appeared on the
covers of Fortune and Time magazines, in 1968.
An innovative artist with diverse interests, Bearden also designed costumes and sets for the Alvin
Ailey American Dance Theater, and programs, sets and designs for Nanette Bearden's
Contemporary Dance Theatre.
Watching the Good Trains Go By,1964
Pittsburg Memory 1964