One early example is Hurlements en

faveur de Sade (1952) from Guy-Ernest Debord, where a black and a white screen

are shown alternately over a period of 80 minutes. During the white scenes texts

of laws, newspaper notices etc. are recited.3 However, Debord cannot be considered

a Minimalist artist. He was closely connected with the Situationist International,

a radical group of artists who stuck to a strongly political programme

between 1957 and 1972. In Minimal Art, however, all forms of political commitment

were substituted by concentrating on aesthetics.

About 10 years later Andy Warhol’s film Empire (1963) shows the filming of the

Empire State Building in New York from the 44th floor of the Time Life Buildingfor a period of eight hours. He maintains the same camera position and angle

throughout the whole film. As the object itself does not change and there is no

sound track the lighting conditions are the only changing element in the film

but are also reduced to a minimum by the use of black and white as well as by

the fact that the image changes only slightly.

Similar to Debord, Warhol’s film stands out from the rest of his works as an

extraordinary piece of art which laid the basis for Pop Art. Although his artistic

movement evolved at the same time as Minimalism, it clearly distances itself

from the latter by elevating mass phenomena to works of art.