Name: The Case for Minimalism | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios
Uploaded: 2017-10-01T12:45:34.000Z
Duration: 4 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So you see a few cubes sitting in an art gallery,

"This is the greatest hoax that anyone has ever pulled off."

You immediately walk away, discouraged by the wide gulf

between what you hope for when you walk into a museum

How could these cubes that the artist didn't even make

First off, we're not talking about minimalism

as a general sensibility
or the life-changing magic of tidying up.

when all of a sudden,
there was a lot of geometric, abstract art.

Some of it was painting by artists
like Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly,

by artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin,

Anne Truitt, Robert Morris, Tony Smith,
Ronald Bladen, and Sol LeWitt.

Art critics called it ABC art, object art,

These artists never called their art minimalist, by the way,

or the implication that the work
was so reductive that it was minimally art.

But minimalism was a rejection of what came before.

which dominated the art market in the 1950s.

These new artists wanted to remove expression completely,

remove emotion, empty the work of idiosyncratic gesture,

make it resistant to biographical reading.

avoided allusion, metaphor, and overt symbolism.

The forms were often repeated, one thing after another

in regular, non-hierarchical arrangements,

No artist hemming and hawing over the canvas here.

fabricated from new and industrial materials.

Sometimes this entailed ready-made units,

like Andre's bricks, or Flavin's fluorescent tubes.

They didn't want you to ooh and ah,
or admire the handling of paint.

As LeWitt once said, "It is best that the basic unit

Robert Morris wrote that he could
hear a resounding no at the time.

"No to transcendence and spiritual values,

"historicizing narrative, valuable artifact,

"intelligent structure, interesting visual experience."

But what they were saying yes to
was a new and startling realness.

Abandoning the pedestal to dismantle
the separation between you and the art.

Judd claimed these works are neither painting nor sculpture,

but instead specific objects occupying real space.

These objects aren't pointing to anything
or referencing anything.

Andre called his work a kind of plastic poetry,

in which elements are combined to produce space.

So there is no illusion of space, it just is space.

Minimalism had its haters from the start.

In 1967, art critic Michael Fried
attacked the work for being theatrical.

For him it was an object in a room
that had presence before a viewer,

but it did not have what good art has, which is presentness,

"which occurs in no real space or time at all."

But Fried really just ended up affirming
exactly what the artists were trying to do:

Despite its detractors, minimalism became all the rage.

This geometric, unadorned style flowed throughout the worlds

And then because these artists were never trying

they moved on to other things
and other kinds of art had its day.

For centuries, art had been trying to trick you,

convince you that the hunk of rock
was something other than a hunk of rock.

You feel like there's gotta be some secret to it, but there isn't.

It wasn't supposed to look like art of the past,

and it wasn't supposed to function like it either.

With minimalism, meaning doesn't rest inside the object,

The meaning is in the context,
and exists in your interaction with it.

It encourages observation, but doesn't draw you in,

Remember, these objects were supposed to be emptied

of prevention, of mastery, of the usual seduction

and of the grand, glorious traditions that preceded them.

But the fetishization and commodification of minimalist art

has complicated and polluted these ideas.

What's less real than million-dollar plywood boxes?

And yet, for me at least, minimalist art
can still impart a strong feeling,

a feeling for space, light, for presence and absence.

You're aware of your own body in the gallery
as you've never been before.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Case for Minimalism | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

perception

illusion

present

experience