About minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features and core self expression. In other fields of art, it has been used to describe the plays of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with the visual arts. The term has expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, for example the music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Terry Riley. It is rooted in the spare aspects of Modernism, and is often associated with Postmodernism and reaction against Expressionism in both painting and composition. Generally, Pop art and Minimalism are considered to be the last Modern art movements and thus the precursors to Contemporary art or Postmodern art.
The term “minimalist” can also refer to anything which is spare, stripped to its essentials, or providing only the outline of structure, independent of the particular art movement, and “minimalism” the tendency to reduce to fundamentals. It is sometimes applied to groups or individuals practicing asceticism and the reduction of physical possessions and needs to a minimum.
Musical minimalism
In classical music of the last 35 years, the term minimalism is sometimes applied to music which displays some or all of the following features: repetition (often of short musical phrases, with minimal variations over long periods of time) or stasis (often in the form of drones and long tones); emphasis on consonant harmony; a steady pulse. Minimalist music can sometimes sound similar to different forms of techno-electronic music (e.g. chill out), as well as the texture-based compositions of composers such as Gyorgy Ligeti; it is often the case that the end result is similar, but the approach is not.
The term minimalism, endowed independently by composer-critics Michael Nyman and Tom Johnson, has been controversial, but was in wide use by the mid-1970s. The application of a visual art term to music has been protested; however, not only do minimalist sculpture and music share a certain spare simplicity of means and an aversion to ornamental detail, but many of the early minimalist concerts happened in connection with exhibits of minimalist art by Sol LeWitt and others. Several composers associated with minimalism have disavowed the term, notably Glass, who has reportedly said, “That word should be stamped out!!”.
Minimalist design
The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture.
Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto “Less is more” to describe his aesthetic tactics of flattening and emphasizing the building’s frame, eliminating interior walls and adopting an open plan, and reducing the structure to a strong, transparent, elegant skin. Designer Buckminster Fuller adopted a similar saying, “Doing more with less”, but his concerns were more oriented towards technology and engineering than aesthetics.
Contemporary architects working in this tradition include John Pawson, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Tadao Ando, Yoshio Tanaguchi, Peter Zumthor, Vincent Van Duysen, Claudio Silvestrin, Michael Gabellini, and Richard Gluckman.
Minimalism in visual art
Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as “ABC Art,” emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism. As artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1977 catalog essay Last Exit: Painting, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg’s claims about Modernist Painting’s reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, even though the term “minimalism” was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as-such.
In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by composer John Cage. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in complete opposition to the previous decade’s Abstract Expressionists. Very soon they created a minimal style, whose features included: rectangular and cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, industrial materials, all of which leads to immediate visual impact.
The first art specifically associated with Minimalism was Frank Stella, whose “stripe” paintings provided the first of the reductive works that would follow as “minimalism.” Minimalist sculpture is greatly focused on the materials used.
The origins of Minimalism are in the geometric abstractions of pre-World War II painters in the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivists and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncu§i (whose work was a major influence on the Minimalism of Robert Morris).The Russian Constructivists proclaiming the distillation was in order to create a universal language of art which the masses were meant to understand. It may have also supported the rapid industrialization planned for the massive country. Brâncu§i’s work was much more of a search for the purity of the form and thus paved the way for the abstractions that were to come, such as minimalism.
This style was heavily criticised. It was called futile, mechanistic, mandarin, elitist, circular, pedantic and authoritarian. Some critics thought they were dealing with outright fraud. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its “theatricality”: that Minimalist work, especially sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator transforming the act of viewing the work into a spectace.
Other Minimalist artists include: Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, John McCracken, Robert Smithson, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella and Anne Truitt.
Ad Reinhardt summed up the style in these terms:
‘The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.’
Also notable are the post-minimalists, including Hannah Wilke, Martin Puryear and Joel Shapiro. The hallmark of post-minimalism is the often distinct references to objects without direct representation.
Literary minimalism
Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist authors eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story, to “choose sides” based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than reacting to directions from the author. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional; they’re average people who sell pool supplies or coach second tier athletic teams, not famous detectives or the fabulously wealthy. Generally, the short stories are “slice of life” stories.
Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classifiy this prose style as minimalism.
Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the meta-fiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also spare with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter.
Minimalist authors include the following: Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Hemp, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, and Alicia Erian.
The Irish author Samuel Beckett is also known for his minimalistic plays and prose.
Minimalism in Film
Minimalism also exists within the realm of filmmaking. Minimalist filmmakers tend to reduce their works to the bare essentials, both in terms of mis-en-scèné, narrative, and filmic construction. Long takes, static frames, distinct framing/composition, as well as stories dealing with more internal narratives are common place.
Minimalist films are usually found mainly within the arthouse sector of filmmaking, as the techniques used can sometimes be considered too jarring for a mainstream audience. This though, is not always the case.
Paradigm examples of minimalist films are Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), both of which are extended-duration (5 and 8 hours respectively), real-time single-continuous-shot films. The difficulty, however, of terming Warhol’s films minimalist is their length, which is extravagant. And, as their length is their most significant feature, it often precludes them from the minimalist canon. More recently, Gus van Sant’s Gerry (2002) could be termed minimalist, due to its absence of dialog and scenic variety, and only the barest narrative. Other films which some have called minimalist include Last Life in the Universe, 3 Iron, and Invisible Waves.
Article found in Wikipedia.