How Are the Aesthetics of Minimalism Similar in Both Music and Visual Art?

"A shape, a book, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't exist concealed equally function of a fairly dissimilar whole."

ane of 9

"When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent credence of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations."

ii of 9

"Making fine art is complicated considering the categories are ever changing. You lot merely have to make your own fine art, and any categories it falls into volition come later."

three of 9

"I consider space to exist a material. The articulation of infinite has come up to accept precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct."

iv of 9

"As I have said many times, for me an artist is a person who says he's an artist, and an artwork is what an artist says is an artwork."

v of nine

"There's data and there's the object; there's the sensing of it; there's the thinking that connects to procedure. It's on different levels. And I like using those dissimilar levels."

six of ix

"No to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicizing narrative, valuable antiquity, intelligent structure, interesting visual experience."

seven of ix

"The steel and the space, or the object and the void, become one and the same."

viii of 9

"I like art every bit thought better than fine art equally work. I've ever maintained this. It's important to me that I don't become my easily dingy. It'due south not considering I'm instinctively lazy. It'southward a declaration: art is thought."

9 of 9

Summary of Minimalism

Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s among artists who were cocky-consciously renouncing contempo art they thought had go stale and academic. A wave of new influences and rediscovered styles led younger artists to question conventional boundaries betwixt various media. The new art favored the cool over the "dramatic": their sculptures were oft fabricated from industrial materials and emphasized anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstruse Expressionism. Painters and sculptors avoided overt symbolism and emotional content, but instead called attending to the materiality of the works. By the stop of the 1970s, Minimalism had triumphed in America and Europe through a combination of forces including museum curators, fine art dealers, and publications, plus new systems of private and authorities patronage. And members of a new move, Mail service-Minimalism, were already challenging its potency and were thus a attestation to how important Minimalism itself became.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• Minimalists distanced themselves from the Abstract Expressionists by removing suggestions of biography from their fine art or, indeed, metaphors of whatever kind. This denial of expression coupled with an involvement in making objects that avoided the appearance of fine fine art led to the creation of sleek, geometric works that purposefully and radically eschew conventional artful appeal.
• The post-Sputnik era revived active interest in Russian Constructivism. The Constructivist approach led to the use of modular fabrication and industrial materials in preference to the arts and crafts techniques of traditional sculpture. The readymades of Marcel Duchamp were also inspirational examples of the employment of prefabricated materials. Based on these sources, Minimalists created works that resembled factory-built bolt and upended traditional definitions of art whose pregnant was tied to a narrative or to the artist.
• The utilise of prefabricated industrial materials and simple, often repeated geometric forms together with the emphasis placed on the concrete space occupied by the artwork led to some works that forced the viewer to confront the organisation and scale of the forms. Viewers likewise were led to feel qualities of weight, superlative, gravity, agility or even the appearance of calorie-free as a material presence. They were often faced with artworks that demanded a physical every bit well as a visual response.
• Minimalists sought to pause downward traditional notions of sculpture and to erase distinctions between painting and sculpture. In particular, they rejected the formalist dogma espoused past the critic Clement Greenberg that placed limitations on the art of painting and privileged artists who seemed to paint under his direction. The Minimalists' more autonomous point of view was set out in writings also as exhibitions by their leaders Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris.

Overview of Minimalism

Having finished his undergraduate degree at Princeton, Frank Stella moved to New York where he worked every bit a business firm painter to pay his rent. He used commercial paint bought at a dollar per gallon with simple painter brushes to create his Black Paintings (1958-60), which made him famous when he was simply 23. The works were foundational in the development of Minimalism, as his statement, "What you see is what you see," became the movement'southward mantra.

Primal Artists

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  Carl Andre is an American Minimalist whose prominence rose in the late 1960s with a series of large public artworks and sculpture. His linear sculpture was included in the famed 1966 Primary Structures grouping exhibition at the Jewish Museum.

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  Dan Flavin was an American artist best known for his Minimalist constructions of color and light. Often using nothing more than a few dozen fluorescent bulbs for his piece of work, Flavin was a crucial figure in the Minimalism of the 1960s and '70s. His lite installations altered the physical exhibition space, and were designed equally experiential art rather than visual art.

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  Donald Judd was an early and influential Minimalist artist who made large-scale geometric objects, often of industrial materials and serially arranged on the floor or wall. He helped found the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where many key works of Minimalism are installed.

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  Kenneth Noland was an American painter who helped pioneer the Color-field painting movement in the 1960s. His most famous works consist of round ripples of paint poured straight onto the canvass.

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  Richard Serra is an American Procedure and Minimalist artist. His sculptures have ranged from hurled drips of molten atomic number 82 to gigantic steel pieces installed in public places.

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  Frank Stella is an American artist whose geometric paintings and shaped canvases underscore the idea of the painting as object. A major influence on Minimalism, his iconic works include nested black and white stripes and concentric, angular half-circles in vivid colors.

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  Sol LeWitt was an American creative person ordinarily associated with the Minimalist and Conceptual movements. He rose to prominence in the 1960s with the likes of Rauschenberg, Johns and Stella, and his work was included in the famous 1966 exhibit Principal Structures at the Jewish Museum. LeWitt's art often employed simple geometric forms and archetypal symbols, and he worked in a diverseness of media but was most interested in the thought behind the artwork.

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  Martin was a Canadian-born American painter who something of a recluse and whose art was informed by Eastern Taoist philosophy and contained elements of spirituality. Her prized painting manner employed simple lines, grid patterns and soft colors.

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  Robert Morris is an American creative person whose early L-beam and column sculptures were key works in Minimalism. His work also includes felt and c pieces, performance, body art, and earthworks, often with an emphasis on process and theatricality.

Do Not Miss

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  Post-Minimalism refers to a range of art practices that emerged in the wake of Minimalism in the tardily 1960s, such equally Body art, Operation, Procedure art, Site-Specific art, and aspects of Conceptual art. Some artists created art objects that practise not have the representational role of traditional sculpture, objects that often have a strong fabric presence; others reacted against Minimalism's impersonality, and reintroduced emotionally expressive qualities.

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  Low-cal and Space is an art movement founded in the 1960s that was continued to several different contemporary movements including minimalism, op-art, and geometric abstraction. The California-based movement focused on creating works related to light, volume, and calibration through installations.

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  The artistic history of the United states stretches from indigenous art and Hudson River School into Contemporary fine art. Savor our guide through the many American movements.

Important Art and Artists of Minimalism

Die Fahne Hoch! (1959)

Unquestionably a key monument in mod art, this work, ane of the serial of Black Paintings done by Frank Stella, is a bold counter-movement confronting the eminent Abstract Expressionist painters. It is a monochrome rectangular painting on a heavy chassis projecting from the wall into surrounding infinite as if urging the viewer to move back. Magnetized, the viewer is fatigued closer seeking to read the blueprint of pinstripes on the surface. These stripes are in fact the raw sail revealed between wide black stripes painted with few visible brushstrokes. The painting is an unframed, apartment abstraction and would announced to be meaningless except for its championship: Die Fahne Hoch! (Raise Loftier the Flag!), the opening words of the Nazi anthem. Stella has denied whatsoever political connection, and ane could maybe meet the title every bit a wave to Jasper Johns, whose American flag paintings of 1954-55 were met with praise past his critics, but also a full general public bewilderment.

Stella challenged the traditional dichotomy between painting and sculpture that was championed by Clement Greenberg and other modernists, particularly those associated with Abstract Expressionism. In particular, Greenberg felt that each medium and, indeed, each art course should be pure with no overlap with other media, an idea that is directly disputed past Stella's canvass/object and most Minimalists.

Scholars accept read the title equally an instance of Minimalists' often-in-your-face up aesthetics and their refusal to brand works that are visually appealing, instead forcing the viewer to confront works on a concrete level as a way of disputing the conventional relationship between the viewer and the work of fine art in which the viewer simply appreciates or admires the visual entreatment of a piece of work.

Die (1962)

Artist: Tony Smith

The artist'due south specifications for the sculpture were every bit follows: "a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel with diagonal internal bracing." The dimensions were determined, according to Tony Smith, by the proportions of the human trunk. Smith explained that a larger scale would have endowed Die with the stature of a "monument," while a smaller one would have reduced it to a mere "object." Weighing approximately 500 pounds and resting on the museum floor, the sculpture invites us to walk around it and experience information technology sequentially, one or two sides at a fourth dimension. Like other examples of Minimalism, its unreadable surface and frank lack of visual appeal come across every bit nigh hostile in its undermining of traditional understandings of art as something aesthetically or emotionally appealing, showing the artist'due south rejection of Brainchild Expressionism's hands-on approach to art making.

The sculpture's deceptively elementary title invites multiple associations: it alludes to die casting, to one of a pair of dice, and, ultimately, to death. As Smith remarked, "Six feet has a proposition of being cooked. 6 pes box. Half-dozen foot under." Rationality, evoked by Die's purely geometric configuration, is countered past the sculpture'due south brooding presence. Meaning becomes relative rather than accented, something generated through the interplay of word and object. Weaving together strains of compages, industrial manufacture, and the found object, Smith radically transformed the mode sculpture could await, how it could be made, and, ultimately, how it could be understood.

Lever (1966)

Creative person: Carl Andre

Carl Andre'due south Lever was the most audacious entry at the 1966 Primary Structures exhibition that introduced the public to Minimalism. This row of 137 firebricks aligned to project out from the wall and direct across the floor was likened past Andre to a fallen column. Lever startled gallery visitors, interrupted their movement and, in its simplicity, was annoying. Made from easily available building materials ("anyone could do it: where was the art?"), Lever demanded respect from thoughtful viewers while undermining traditional artistic values. Such provocations became routine for Andre: "my ambition as an artist is to exist the 'Turner of matter.' Equally Turner severed color from depiction, so I attempt to sever matter from depiction." He went on to describe forest as the "mother of matter" and praised bricklayers equally "people of fine craft."

In this fashion, Andre's Lever along with many Minimalist works challenged how fine art was situated in the gallery and how viewers interacted with it. Art no longer was hung discreetly on the wall or placed on a pedestal in the corner as something to enjoy in a purely visual style. It now required a more than complex and thoughtful interaction from the viewer. This piece is made of nontraditional materials that call to mind industrial or building materials that require no manipulation from the hand of the artist. While the work is nonrepresentational, the title is suggestive of transmission labor.

Useful Resources on Minimalism

Books

websites

articles

video clips

Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf

Edited and published past The Art Story Contributors

"Minimalism Movement Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
Available from:
Offset published on 21 Mar 2015. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed ]

yazzieshrod1959.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/minimalism/

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