Minimalism and it's Malcontents

My dear witches and wizards, sorcerers and sorceresses, necromancers and limiinal beings,

This week we read through the rivers of 'Minimalism' (or reductivism or literalism, depending on what slur one wants to throw about). Minimalism is one of those bizarre art movements that sets its own standard, but the text that is almost always and consistently thrown around during a discussion of minimalism is 'Art and Objecthood" written by Michael Fried. Fried does not like minimalism, and it is interesting to note that basically the seminal text on minimalism is a complete bash of it.

Minimalism is grounded in some topics we have been going over:

1) phenomenology
2) constructivism
3) gestalt
4) industrial materials
5) the gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art), think of this idea in relation to the notion of a gestalt of the gestalt...

In the packet readings, Stella and Judd discuss these topics in length and place themselves within those contexts. Notice the malcontent they have for Ab Ex painting and lyrical abstraction (tachisme) in general. There is a malaise in relaion to almost all other forms of art...except Pop art. They hold Oldenberg in next to the highest regard possible.

We talked last week about where postmodernism starts. This is a good a place as any and one worth pausing on to address as the start of 'postmodernism'. Remember 'postmodernism' and 'poststructuralism', are not really terms a postmodernist/ poststructuralist artist would use, because they tend to not define things in such structural or modernist ways.

Topics to think about:

1) the minimalists are the first true generation of artists to earn MFA degrees.
2) distinguishing between different genres after minimalism will becme hard, because many of these artists exist in several different camps: robert morris (minimalism, concept art), robert smithson (minimalism, concept art, earth art, site-specific work), etc...
3) the death of the author, which I have posted in the blog post "Outside Readings", note the end of the text, on how the death of the author means the birth of the reader...think back to our discussion of "who/what/how is the/an audience?"
4) what constitutes a 'good' work of art?
5) "the anxiety of influence"
6) look at the essays from the Artforums around the time 'Art and Objecthood' was published (about 1966-67): Robert Smithson, "Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site"; Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"; Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture"

As a side note here, and to end, Michael Fried went to the ropes saying that minimalism and conceptualism sucked. The other writers at Artforum left and founded a periodical named October (members of which wrote this text), and after a few years of having theoretical debates with Smithson and Judd, Michael Fried hung up his boxing gloves and left the contemporary art arena to apply his phenomenological hermeneutics to 19th century art.

Perhaps it was the 'dark mark'.