MINIMALISM (18 marzo 1959 anni – 31 magg 1970 anni)

Descrizione:

1959 - 1970

- extreme visual reduction
- Art no longer to serves the state or religion
- No reference to an object of thing
- Influenced by composers such as John Cage
- The viewer completes the composition by standing in front of it and beholding it
- Originality in art is not necessary (unlike in abstract expressionists who wanted to develop their own style)

Malevich's suprematist work was the basis of Minimalism

Reaction to Pop Art in a negative way. Artists found refuge in the material because American life was not as happy as it was made out to be in Pop Art

Also a reaction to AE
The minimalists wanted to replace the subjective, symbolic and surrealist content of the abstract expressionist with reason and order and logic.



KUSAMA
- Large scale sculptural work
- Net paintings
- Applies black paint and covers it with hand painted many arcs
- Art was a result of obsessive/repetitive behaviour
○ Could be a result of the 2 atomic bombs that were dropped in Japan during WWII
- Grid-like structure
- Not a minimalist but an influence to the minimalists

STELLA
- Deviated from rectangular canvas (shaped and cut-out canvases)
- Flat surfaces
- Used industrial materials (house, aluminum, and copper paint and industrial brushes)
- Wanted to replace the symbolic/subjective with reason, order, and logic
○ Grid replaced expression
○ Art is just paint applied on a surface
- Critics couldn't explain his art (art is considered "empty")
○ Wanted to subvert the critics
- Only wanted the viewer to see the art not an representation of an object
- "What you see is what you see"

MARTIN
- Look machine made but are hand drawn grids (visible pencil marks)
○ Replacing the real with one flat surface
- symmetry, repetition of small units
○ Represented innocence
- Wanted truth in materials

SO LEWITT
- Inspired by the engineering aesthetic of constructivism and Muybridge
- Grids and cubes
- Began making structures no sculptures
- The aim of the artist is to give the viewer information not instruct them
○ Doesn't matter if the viewer doesn't understand the given information
○ No emotion/feeling
- Avoided subjectivity
- Construction, not a sculpture
○ Traditional sculpture is carved/molded
- Work looks at volume, transparency, and consistency
- Created using instructions
○ The work of art is in the instructions, carrying it our is incidental
- believed that the idea is more important than the form
- eliminates the hand of the artist
- Connects architectural structures with lines

FLAVIN
- Influenced by constructivism
- Medium: fluorescent tubes
○ Was a basic building block
○ Length couldn't be changed
- "electric light defining space"
- used light to transform the environment
- interest in technology and light
- unwillingness to disguise the nature of their medium

JUDD
- Space is more powerful than paint on a canvas
- Medium: plexiglass, stainless steel, metal
- Repeated objects
○ Make artist aware of the space between objects
- art created unity through repetition of identical units and absolute symmetry (unlike constructivist work and abstract geometry work)

ANDRE
- Materials that can be bought from a hardware store
○ Arranged them to make it art
- Equivalent
○ Same number of bricks but arranged in different rectangles
- "floorpieces": art that could be walked on
○ Art change and be altered (will be a record of what happened to it)
- direct interaction between the artist and the audience

HESSE
- Repetition of shape and objects with slight variations in shape and spacing
- Humanizes the industrial material
- Doesn't have a fixed shape
- Loose and open grids
- Close friend of Sol LeWitt (inspired by his floor sculptures)
- Art is fragile (hard to preserve, not fixed to anything)
- Non-mechanical repetition
- focussed on process (the work showcases how it was made)
- interaction between the work and gravity (hanging/sagging sculptures)
- humanizes repeated objects (slightly different organic shape, colour, and position)

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