The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
"minimalism" as mere lifestyle choice


The plodding and dutiful but intellectually superficial and thus easily bored online performative character known as "TiR" expected ArtForum's new interview (paywalled, yegodz) with Jacques Herzog, by Julian Rose, to be factually informative but boring.

On the latter count, we were proven entirely wrong, as we so often enjoy happening, after the first 5 seconds . . .  then read several minutes later:

Rose: . . . Minimalism is a term hotly contested between art and architecture, largely because many artists feel that architects reduced it to something purely aesthetic. If for Judd and other artists of his generation Minimalism was about shifting the emphasis from object to experience, rethinking the way seeing is framed by the spatial envelope of the gallery and inflected by our movement through it, for architects in the ’80s and ’90s it became just a look, or even a lifestyle -- a branding slogan.

Herzog: Oh yes, I agree. Minimalism became an aesthetic school, especially in Switzerland and England, and then also in America and elsewhere. A number of architects became famous for their “Minimalist” boxes. We felt responsible for that evolution, since we did radically Minimalist work early on. . . . Also, we introduced the term Minimalism to describe an approach to structure and materiality, which was different from what architects were doing at that time, and was closer, in fact, to the concepts of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and of course Judd.

Herzog goes on to mention "our rejection of the way Minimalism had been reduced to a style. Paradoxically, Minimalism led us to ornament, which seems to be its opposite."



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Judd, of course, famously in 1965 (.pdf):

"It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyse one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful. They are not diluted by an inherited format, variations of a form, mild contrasts and connecting parts and areas.”

Two random Fred Sandback quotes from 1975, both accessible here:

A piece made with just a few lines at first seems very purist and geometrical. My work isn’t either of these things. . . . I intend what I do to be concrete and particular. It’s just the opposite of abstract art, which is derived, deduced, or refined from something else. . . . Keeping the art from being decorative is a hard thing -- using only a line, it easily becomes pretty or zappy -- the phenomenon isolates itself too easily -- becomes just something to look at. (from "Statements")


I’d rather be in the middle of a situation than over on one side either looking in or looking out. . . .  I don’t make "dematerialized art." I complicate actual situations, and this is as material as anything else. (from "Notes")

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8/21/18 edit

. . . to add a passage, from Anna C. Chave's brilliant and classic, "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power" (1990) (.pdf):

Whereas Pop Art initially caused a collective shudder of distaste within the intelligentsia while being rapidly embraced by the public at large, Minimalism (in the same period) generally garnered toleration, at the least, from the cognoscenti, and either deep skepticism or unmitigated loathing from the public at large. . . . 

[W]hat disturbs viewers most about Minimalist art may be what disturbs them about their own lives and times, as the face it projects is the society’s blankest, steeliest face; the impersonal face of technology, industry, and commerce . . . 

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM