So you see a few cubes sitting in an art gallery,
and you think to yourself,
"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
and what they've presented to you.
How did we get here?
How could these cubes that the artist didn't even make
with their own hands be important?
This is the case for minimalism.
First off, we're not talking about minimalism
as a general sensibility or the life-changing magic of tidying up.
We're talking about the art
of a particular moment in time.
Namely, the 1960s,
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,
but most of it was sculpture
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,
primary structures, and cool art,
but the term minimalism prevailed.
These artists never called their art minimalist, by the way,
nor did they like the term,
or the implication that the work was so reductive that it was minimally art.
But minimalism was a rejection of what came before.
Specifically, abstract expressionism,
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.
Their hard-edged, basic shapes and forms
avoided allusion, metaphor, and overt symbolism.
The forms were often repeated, one thing after another
in regular, non-hierarchical arrangements,
rejecting compositional balancing.
No artist hemming and hawing over the canvas here.
The objects were impersonal,
many of them machine-made,
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
"be deliberately uninteresting."
Robert Morris wrote that he could hear a resounding no at the time.
"No to transcendence and spiritual values,
"heroic scale, anguished decisions,
"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,
or, "an instant of aesthetic experience
"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:
proving how radical it really was.
Despite its detractors, minimalism became all the rage.
This geometric, unadorned style flowed throughout the worlds
of fashion, theater, and design.
In short, it was cool.
And then because these artists were never trying
to be minimalist to begin with,
they moved on to other things and other kinds of art had its day.
But minimalism changed things.
For centuries, art had been trying to trick you,
convince you that the hunk of rock was something other than a hunk of rock.
But not this.
You feel like there's gotta be some secret to it, but there isn't.
There's nothing to interpret.
This is what it is.
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,
waiting to be unlocked.
The meaning is in the context, and exists in your interaction with it.
But minimalism is a resistant lover.
It's just not that into you.
It encourages observation, but doesn't draw you in,
and it was never trying to.
Remember, these objects were supposed to be emptied
of prevention, of mastery, of the usual seduction
between art and viewer,
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.
You notice that your position in the room shapes your perception of the thing.
You appreciate the architecture and the spareness,
and in a world filled with complexity and information
and lots and lots of stuff, this is a balm.
This is a world more simplified than the actual world is,
and that I can appreciate.