Ludwig Mies van der Rohe quotes

“God is in the details.”

“I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.”

“Less is more.”

“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.”

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”

“A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.”

“It is better to be good than to be original.”

“True education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values. Our aims assure of us of our material life, our values make possible our spiritual life.

“Let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work. Let us lead them into the healthy world of primitive building methods, where there was meaning in every stroke of an axe, expression in every bite of chisel.”

Definition of Minimalism

The majority of Minimalist artists work with simple geometric figures. Squares or cubes are often used as they are considered ideal because of their identical side lengths. The objects are related to the room in a natural way, situated parallel to the walls and the grain. The material itself is hardly processed by the artist as it is mostly automatically prefabricated and standardized. So it already meets the minimum requirements for a sculpture, namely spatiality, mass and material1, and only in a few cases the artist exceeds this minimum. Another essential aspect is the critical stance of Minimalists towards art in general and towards traditional galleries in particular, which becomes visible for instance by the unwieldy objects that seem totally oversized for small exhibition rooms.

Protagonists of the Minimalist Movement

Minimalism is considered mainly an American phenomenon, although its historical development is not limited to the USA. However, in art and music only Americans are considered to be the most important representatives, mostly working in New York. To be more precise, in Minimal Art mainly the five artists Carl Andre (born in Massachusetts in 1935), Dan Flavin (born in Jamaica, NY, in 1933; died in Riverhead, NY, in 1996), Donald Judd (born in Missouri in 1928; died in New York in 1994), Sol LeWitt (born in Connecticut in 1928; died there in 2007) and Robert Morris (born in Kansas City in 1931) are worth mentioning. The representativesof Minimal Music are Philip Glass (born in Baltimore in 1937), Steve Reich (born in New York in 1936), Terry Riley (born in California in 1935) and La Monte Young (born in Idaho in 1935). Nevertheless, the classification of their works was not suggested by themselves but, as is often the case, by art and music critics. The term Minimal Art appears for the first time in Richard Wollheim’s essay with this very title. As for Minimal Music, however, it is unclear whether the concept was first used to name the Minimalist movement by Michael Nyman (born in London in 1944) in 1968 or by Tom Johnson (born in Colorado in 1939) in 1972.3 Some artists were opposed to subsuming the different approaches under the concept of Minimalism. According to Steve Reich such a musical label does not have a positive impact on musical thinking for it mostly determines who the artist is and defines him. This is what a composer wants to avoid at all costs because he wants to become part of something unknown.

History of Minimal Art

Although in 1967 such an attentive critic as Lucy Lippart helplessly explained that Minimalism was a virgin birth5 the idea of radical reduction as the basic principle of minimal concepts did not emerge with Minimal Art but was already used by Kasimir Malevich in Suprematism around 1912. Malevich’s Black Square on White Ground (1913) exemplifies the reduction of elements to a basic quadratic form, seeming to be detached from the picture itself. There are also concrete analogies with Russian Constructivism in the early 1920s, considering for instance Vladimir Tatlin (born in Moscow in 1885; died therein 1953) and Alexander Rodtschenko (born in St. Petersburg in 1891; died in

Moscow in 1956) who wanted to integrate industrial production into an artistic environment. Further approaches, though not so much in an aesthetic but in a more conceptual way, were taken by Marcel Duchamp (born in Blainville-Creon in 1887; died near Paris in 1968) who provoked a far-reaching scandal in the art world with his Readymades already in 1914. In Duchamp’s view the definition of art should include the selection of materials used. Following this definition, he simply exhibits

a urinal named Fountain in a museum. The reduction of his artistic work

reveals clear parallels to Minimal Art and especially Duchamp’s art criticism is very closely tied to Minimalism. However, at a closer look slight differences can be found. Duchamp tries to convert the existing conventions in the art world into subjects of irony, whereas Minimal Art aims at revolutionising them. The art historian Irving Sandler, too, describes it as an art that is exclusively created to criticise art, without any other purpose.6 This intended possibility of Non-Art holds also true for Pop Art, emerging at the same time as Minimalist approaches

to art in around 1962. Yet, only from 1965 onwards attention is drawn

to Minimal Art in larger exhibitions in New York. While Pop Art elevates objects of mass culture to objects of art, this concept is totally rejected in Minimal Art. Contrary to contemplating previous movements that had an impact on Minimal Art, it does not appear reasonable to go into detail concerning the history of Minimal Art itself at this point, as conventional art chronologies do not live up to the expectations of a differentiated discussion of this topic. In this context, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl is worth mentioning who is of the opinion that the history of Minimal Art cannot yet be written as it is still not finished.7 This remark

dating from the year 1984 is still true and confirmed by the fact that, above all,formal criteria of Minimal Art are still applied in architecture and design. By contrast, Minimal Music has had a relatively low impact on comparable movements in other fields.

 

1 Lippert, Werner: 1965. Fragmente einer Reise durch die Kunst. 1975. In: Kunsthalle

Bielefeld (ed.), Concept Art, Minimal Art, Arte Povera, Land Art. Marzona

Collection. Bielefeld 1990, p. 29.

2 Urmetzer, Reinhold: Abschied von der Kopfmusik. In: NZ 12/1984, p. 18.

3 Schaefer, John: New Sounds. A Listener’s Guide to New Music. New York 1987,

p. 64.

4 Lovisa, Fabian R.: minimal-music. Darmstadt 1996, p. 15.

5 Stemmrich, Gregor (ed.): Minimal Art. Eine kritische Retrospektive. Dresden/

Basel 1995, p. 559.

6 Gibson, Eric: Was Minimalist art a political movement? In: The New Criterion,

Vol. 5, No. 9, May 1987, p. 63.

7 Schjeldahl, Peter: Minimalism. In: Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, Vol. 1.

New York 1984, p. 17.

8 Adorno, Theodor W.: Philosophie der neuen Musik. Frankfurt am Main 1976,

p. 46.

9 Glaser, Bruce: Questions to Stella and Judd. In: Art News, Vol. 65, No. 5, September

1966, p. 58.

10 Heere, Heribert: Ad Reinhardt und die Tradition der Moderne. Frankfurt am

Main 1986, p. 44.

11 Schwarz, K. Robert: Minimalists. London 1996, p. 9.

12 Schoenberg, Arnold: Probleme des Kunstunterrichts. In: Musikalisches Taschenbuch

1911, Vol. 2., Vienna 1911.

13 Gibson, Eric: Was Minimalist art a political movement? In: The New Criterion,

Vol. 5, No. 9, May 1987, p. 63.

 

Text From:CHRISTIAN SCHREI,MINIMAL

Empire

 

 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.

with nevillloe brody and rick poynorclickhere

click here

Art is art. Everything else is everithing else

What is minimal? … It was easier to define what minimalism is not. In term of graphic design, minimal does not mean black, empty, devoid, or evan quiet. It does not permit the gratuitous use of white spaces. It absoulutely is not a safety net for lack of contents.

In fact, minimal directly opposes all these things. Minimal graphic design, stripped  of incidental references and pared down to its most essential elements, presents a purity intellectual or visual experience. As the extreme minimalist Ad Reinhardt said,”Art is art. Everything else is everithing else.”

Fishel,Catharine,Minimal graphics,the powerful new look of graphic design,2000,Rockport publishers,ISBN 3-927258-46-6

two minimal film

Film About A Woman Who… (1974)

By :Yvonne Rainer (b. 1935)

Rainer’s work of this period also problematized the conception of the relationship between viewer and artwork that was at the core of the minimalist aesthetic.

Once again, this arose from the fact that the material of dance was the person. A minimalist painting or sculpture was thought to frankly address the viewer and the space of the gallery, to rely upon the viewer for its completion. To seek such a relationship between a live performer and an audience, however, was to risk opening up the dance to all of those things that Rainer had rallied against in her “NO manifesto,” since in dance, the performer/spectator relationship is a human one, in which emotion, empathy, and relations of power are present. Again, one of the basic tenets of minimalism posed a unique problem for live performance. In a way, Rainer can be said to have inverted a key principle of minimalist art by attempting to cut off any kind of human connection between her performers and the audience. For instance, Rainer often instructed her dancers to refuse eye contact with the audience, either by keeping their heads cocked away from the spectators or by looking over and beyond their heads. Ironically, then, Rainer’s performances seem to have initially aspired to the condition Michael Fried called “absorption,” a condition characterized by the work’s refusal to address the viewer, an almost metaphysical detachment of the work from the viewer’s time and space. Fried criticized the minimalist sculptors for their refusal to do this – for the ways their work acknowledged the viewer and depended on him or her for their completion. (Fried, 125-27) Rainer, concerned about the “seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer,” and troubled by the ramifications of the display of the dancers’ bodies for crowds of onlookers, resisted this dimension of minimalist art. In her analysis of her dance Trio A.

(From Erin Brannigan):

 

The Awful Backlash (1967)

Made by Robert Nelson and William Allan 

“In their starkly minimal film, The Awful Backlash, directors Robert Nelson and William Allan, focus solely on a pair of hands as they begin to unravel what appears to be a tangled fishing line. Any further evidence of the title’s confusing ‘awfulness’  other than the literal disentanglement of the line remains, however, tentative, left as it were, literally, at a loose end. The viewer knows nothing of the incident that led to this backlash or entanglement; nor of the directors’ initial motive for the title indeed not of any other attempt at blending an additional storyline beyond what is seen. There is, perhaps, one link with a reverse reaction  a sense of gradual recovery taking place, as the thread unfolds from a position of multiplicity back to a singular line.” (Pamela Kember, Rethinking Refunctioning, ‘Awful Backlash’ catalogue, May 2000)

Erik Satie, a minimal composer

Alfred Éric Leslie Satie (Honfleur, 17 May 1866 – Paris, 1 July 1925) was a French composer and pianist. Starting with his first composition in 1884, he signed his name as Erik Satie. Satie was introduced as a “gymnopedist” in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a “phonometrograph” or “phonometrician” (meaning “someone who measures (and writes down) sounds”) preferring this designation to that of “musician,” after having been called “a clumsy but subtle technician” in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911. In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the dadaist 391 to the American Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on always publishing his work under his own name, in the late nineteenth century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde. He was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music and the Theatre of the Absurd.

 

 

“Minimal Art” in Oxford dictionary

Minimal art:  A type of abstract art, particularly sculpture, characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a deliberate lack of expressive content; it emerged as a trend in the late 1950s and flourished particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. (The term was evidently first used in print by the British philosopher Richard Wollheim in an article entitled ‘Minimal Art’ in Arts Magazine in January 1965, although the American writer Barbara Rose is sometimes credited with coining it; the term ‘Minimalism’ had been used by David Burliuk as early as 1929, but with a vaguer meaning, referring to ‘the minimum of operating means’ in John Graham’s paintings.) There are numerous precedents for the stark simplicity of Minimal art. In 1777, for example, the poet Goethe designed an Altar of Good Fortune for his garden in Weimar consisting of two utterly pure geometrical stone shapes-a sphere surmounting a cube; and in 1883 the journalist Alphonse Allais (1855-1905) created a burlesque version of minimalism when he exhibited in Paris a plain sheet of white paper with the title First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in the Snow (he also produced all-black and all-red pictures with similar comic titles: Negroes Fighting in a Cave at Night and Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Red Sea). Such byways aside, the roots of Minimal art can be traced to the stark geometric abstractions of Malevich and the ready-mades of Duchamp in the second decade of the century, and after this the idea of extreme reductivism occurred in various aspects of avant-garde art-certain sculptures of Brancusi, for example, the Spatialism of Lucio Fontana, and the monochromatic canvases of Yves Klein. As a movement, however, Minimal art developed mainly in the USA rather than Europe and its impersonality is seen as a reaction against the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism. Leading sculptors of the movement include Carl Andre, Don Judd, and Tony Smith; leading painters (for whom the immediate precedents were Albers and Reinhardt) include Frank Stella (in his early work), and Hard-Edge abstractionists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland.

According to The Tate Gallery: An illustrated Companion (1979), ‘The theory of minimalism is that without the diverting presence of “composition”, and by the use of plain, often industrial materials arranged in geometrical or highly simplified configurations we may experience all the more strongly the pure qualities of colour, form, space and materials’. Minimal art has close links with *Conceptual art (Minimalist sculpture often has a strong element of theoretical demonstration about it, with the artist leaving the fabrication of the design to industrial specialists), and there are sometimes affinities with other contemporaneous movements such as Land art. There is even a kinship with *Pop art in a shared preference for slick, impersonal surfaces (some Minimal artists, however, have used ‘natural’ products such as logs rather than machine-finished products). Like Pop art, Minimal art proved a commercial success for many of its leading practitioners, and it generated a huge amount of critical commentary; sometimes it seemed that the less there was to see in a work, the more verbiage it attracted.

See also PRIMARY STRUCTURES. 

Minimalism In Britannica Encyclopedia

Minimalism, chiefly American movement in the visual arts and music originating in New York City in the late 1960s and characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a literal, objective approach.

Minimal art, also called ABC art, is the culmination of reductionist tendencies in modern art that first surfaced in the 1913 composition by the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich of a black square on a white ground. The primary structures of the minimalist, sculptors Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Tony Smith, Anthony Caro, Sol LeWitt, JohnMcf’racken, Craig Kaufman, Robert Duran, and Robert Morris and the hard-edge painting of Jack’ Youngerman, ‘Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, and Gene Davis grew out of these artists’ dissatisfaction with Action painting, a branch of American Abstract Expressionism based on intuitive, spontaneous gesture that had dominated American avant-garde art through much of the 1950s. The minimalists, who believed that Action painting was too personal and’ insubstantial, adopted the point of view that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself. For that reason they attempted to rid their works of any extra-visual association. Use of the hard edge, the simple form, and the linear rather than painterly approach was intended to emphasize two-dimensionality and to allow the viewer an immediate, purely visual response. They turned for inspiration to the impassive, quiet works of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, exponents of the colourfield branch of Abstract Expressionist painting.

Hard-edge painting is characterized by large, simplified, usually geometric forms on an overall flat surface; precise, razor-sharp contours; and broad areas of bright, unmodulated colour that have been stained into unprimed canvas. It differs from other types of geometric abstraction in that it rejects both lyrical and mathematical composition because, even in this simplified field, they are a means of personal expression for the artist. Minimal hardedge painting is the anonymous construction of a simple object.

Minimal sculpture is composed of extremely simple, monumental geometric forms made of fibreglass, plastic, sheet metal, or aluminum, either left raw or solidly painted with bright industrial colours. Like the painters, minimalist sculptors attempted to make their works totally objective, unexpressive, and non-referential.

Minimal art, along with the music of Erik Satie and the aesthetics of John Cage, was a distinct influence on minimalist music. Reacting against the complex, intellectually sophisticated style of modern music, several composers began to compose in a simple, literal style, thereby creating an extremely simple and accessible music. La Monte Young, for example, composed a number of electronic “continuous frequency environments,” in which he generated a few pitches and then electronically sustained them, sometimes for days or weeks. Young added very little to this texture and virtually eliminated variation as a developmental technique. Like Young, Morton Feldman tried to eliminate variation. His works explored innovative instrumental timbres through a slowly paced succession of unrelated, soft sounds. Another group of composers-Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Cornelius Cardew, and Frederic Rzewski-was influenced by the music’ of India, Bali, and West Africa. They used simple harmonic and melodic patterns in their highly repetitive music.

In both music and the visual arts, minimalism was an attempt to explore the essential elements of an art form. In minimalist visual arts, the personal, gestural elements were stripped away in order to reveal the objective, purely visual elements of painting and sculpture. In minimalist music, the traditional treatment of form and development was rejected in favour of explorations of timbre and rhythm-musical elements largely unfamiliar to Western listeners. 

Information Design and the Placebo Effect

Despite Enron and Martha Stewart. scandal in the Catholic Church, and the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I would describe myself as a trusting sort. one who fundamentally still believes in the institutions that govern our public life. That trust was shaken to the very core by a report in the New York Times about the buttons that are mounted on poles at over 3.000 street corners in New York City. Despite the fact that they bear official-looking signs that read “To Cross Street/Push Button/Wait for Walk Signal/Dept. of Transportation,” it appears that at least 2.500 of them have not worked for the last fifteen years.

Like everyone else, I’ve trusted those instructions, pressed the buttons, and waited dutifully, fearing-and, indeed, this is the literal interpretation of the sign-that the light would not change, ever, unless one pushed the button. Now I learn that I have been the dupe of what Times reporter Michael Luo calls mechanical placebos, where “any benefit from them is only imagined.” My eyes newly opened. I wonder; can this possibly be an isolated case?

I have always wondered about those “Door Close· buttons on elevators I mean, the door always eventually closes, but it’s hard to tell if there’s really any causation involved. Like the crosswalk buttons, all of this buttons may function simply as therapy for the overanxious. And It’. Significant that even if they seldom work, they still work sometimes. Every behavioral scientist knows that if you reward the rats every time, they take it for granted; if you never reward them. they give up. the most effective approach is to reward them every once 10 a wht1e. This principal of intermittent reward is well understood by casino owners

I myself have deployed meaningless information to assuage my own anxiety. We bought our first house from a fairly paranoid owner who had outfitted the (modest) property with an elaborate security system. Its operation was well beyond the ken of my family and, after setting off various alarms at various hours of the early morning, we finally had the whole thing disabled. But we left up all those signs reading “This Home is Protected by the Neverrest Ultra Security system’”, reasoning that intruders would be as alarmed by the signs as by the (now disarmed) alarms.

In post 9/11 Manhattan, this exchange of meaningless information has become part of daily life. Visit any office building over four stories in height and you’re likely to run a gauntlet of inquisitors. The truly diligent ones subject visitors to x-ray examination and require tenant escorts. It’s an inconvenient procedure, but at least you can understand its efficacy. More often, you’re merely asked to sign a log and, sometimes. present your driver’s license. How this is supposed to deter cunning terrorists. who presumably can acquire cheap fake IDs as easily as anthrax or dirty bombs. I’ve never understood.

And of course, to move from the personal to the political. DO one is exploring the frontiers of information as placebo like our own Department of Homeland Security. What exactly ate we expected to make of Tom Rldges color-coded terrorism alert levels? When the level is raised. are we supposed to hide under the bed or go about our business? Are they trying to reduce anxiety or increase it? Do they mean anything at all? We do not know. and I am not sure they really know either. But one way or another they seem to be trying to press our buttons.

Bierut,Michael;2007,Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design,China,Princeton Architectural Press,ISBN:978-8-1-56898-699-9,Page 102-103