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Helena Hertzog
ARH 321
Professor Ivey
29 November 2007
Minimalism, Debate and Dan Flavin
With any new art movement comes controversy. As ideas of what makes art good or bad shift so do those comfortable in certain patterns and trends. The transition into minimalism was not an exception to this rule; on the contrary it has one of the greatest histories of controversy and upheaval in the art world. Minimal art has been assessed over and over and has many names, contributors and critics. It goes by ABC Art, Cool Art, Primary Structures, and Literalism. Those artists whom art historians associate greatly with minimalism include Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin (Meyer 3). Some of its greatest critics were Robert Fried and Clement Greenberg himself. There is almost no end to the many nuanced ideas about minimalism and what it strives to achieve. Many thought that it was not art at all while others screamed that it was. However, a general background of the sides would provide a good start towards understanding what minimal art is all about. This paper will do just that. Additionally, it will explore the specific ideas and works of Dan Flavin with his own personalized branch of minimalism, light art.
Movements in art are categorized and labeled after the movement has had time to fully transition and influence the art world. Minimalism began to make progress in the early sixties though it had plenty of preceding artists in the earlier years. In understanding why there was so much upheaval during the transition into minimalism it helps to look a little at what came before: Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollack, Willem De Kooning and others of the abstract expressionist era infused their art with emotion and expressive content. They were richly colored and full of artistic influence and subject. One can imagine then seeing works by these artists and then stumbling on something like Judd’s wooden boxes painted red and entitled, Untitled, and feeling pretty clueless (Archer 46). They were monochromatic and impersonal. Instead of being created they were simply engineered. Critic confusion can often lead to condemnation.
What is most surprising about the amount of debate surrounding minimalism is its resistance to being interpreted at all. Most of what we consider now to be minimalist art claimed to have no meaning at all except for the materials that make the work possible and the austere way they are arranged (Meyer 6). Most who experienced it wanted a lot more from their gallery visit than nothingness. They wanted subject matter and artists’ presence. Who can identify with a bunch of glossy blocks? However, it was this misunderstanding of minimalism that sparked the controversy. Most refused to accept minimal art as art at all so those proponents of it and minimal artists themselves were forced to justify and defend minimalism. Those who argued strongly for minimalism included, Lucy Lippard, Robert Smithson, and Mel Bochner. Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris also wrote at length about their ideas and works (6). However, one should look at the original complaints regarding minimalism before jumping into the rebuttals of the artists. Art critic Michael Fried wrote about how minimal art had become modernism’s biggest enemy.
Fried feared the loss of illusion in art. He was against minimalism as it strove, for some minimal artists, to shake off illusion and simply produce object after object. In his essay, “Art and Objecthood,” he outlined everything he despised about minimalism which he mostly referred to as literalism or deductive art. He began immediately to accuse minimalist sculptures as threatening to completely take over the art scene entirely ridding it of paint altogether (Archer 58). Such power he gave those simple minimalist artists! He also theorized that the whole minimalist idea rejected any kind of formal composition which rendered the art useless. Fried’s idea was that a piece without composition cannot be analyzed because it has no interior parts. Without internal parts there can be no relationships between them and this led to Fried’s idea of minimal art being ‘hollow.’ This hollowness is not in reference to the absence of a physical center but a compositional one (59). Because of this, he theorized, minimal artworks only existed for the audience and that was not enough for him. Even though he gave this power to the viewer to determine what the piece was about, Fried further claimed that these very same hollow pieces left the viewer isolated and distant from him or herself thus taking away the very power he had just bestowed on the audience. This lends to the idea that there is an actual minimal amount of art content in a minimalist work. Fried along with others claimed that minimal art was undifferentiated among itself and even when it was the differences were never at the hand of the artist but rather because of the source of the work such as studio or factory. One more of his final blows to minimalism was Fried’s idea that minimalist works were just not abstract enough (Meyer 233). This was a big claim to make as most art critics and minimalist artists believed any abstraction was symbiotic with form, a very important concept in minimalism. Abstraction led to innovation in form so if minimalism lacked abstraction it also lacked the crucial element of form which was unacceptable to most (223).
In the early sixties, as minimal art became more and more famous, or infamous, a new idea was attached to art. The idea of a work’s ‘presence’ became more and more important. This presence was a work’s ability to affect those not even looking at it (Meyer 232). One can feel the presence of a piece with a turned back or by even being in the next room. Minimal art, despite all its criticisms, had this presence and Fried would not deny this. However, he, unlike those others who admired minimal art, did not see presence as a good thing. This art critic was not to be deceived for he believed that presence simply meant a lack of aesthetic quality in a piece and that many who detected presence in a minimalist piece were simply fooled by the large size, shock value, or just sheer recognition of the work (232)! Size, he swore, was most definitely not art. Along with Fried, the formidable Clement Greenberg took an anti-minimalism stance.
For most of the sixties Greenberg chose to simply ignore minimalism. This tact led his staunch followers to believe that minimalism was not even worth the popular critic’s consideration. In 1967, he came down slightly from his abstract expressionist cloud and wrote “Recentness of Sculpture” which clued his audience in to what exactly he despised so much about minimal art. His most obvious complaint was that the idea of art had started to shift further and further away from actually resembling art. It was very important to him for ‘high art’ to be easily distinguishable from kitsch and simple blocks, angles and lines (Meyer 211-12). He also claimed that minimalism’s simplicity made it easy to understand and then consume. It was pure novelty, a nice prop in fashion and interior design. Its pared down shapes and bulky proportions were not particularly attractive to buyers, however. Despite this, Greenberg continued drawing parallels between minimal installations and decorations and insisted that only those who could not understand the complexity and beauty of formal art turned to minimalism (215-16).
Others attacked minimal art’s simplicity, also, claiming not only was it too simple to be high art that a person’s visual experience was actually decreased by the drastically reduced forms of minimalism (Meyer 3).
It can be difficult to argue such a point. Some argue that minimalism requires no contemplation as it is so easily absorbed in a quick glance. Pillars and tables are some of the most banal of everyday objects so why would one need to enter a gallery to see such similar shapes? It is as if one has entered a room filled with giant sized blocks that babies stack to develop motor skills. Others might call attention to the sterile white background of gallery walls and how they make everything more garish and signal that minimalism is just cold. There is a complete lack of warmth and life and personality to the sculptures. Still others moan that each piece represents something highly reproducible. This is one of the biggest complaints against minimal art. One can never be certain, without proof, that the credited artist actually built the piece with his or her own hands. What the audience loves so much about art has so much to do with admiration of craft. Onlookers find themselves thinking, where is the craft in minimalism? Where is the skill? If Judd and LeWitt can simply specify to others what they want but never actually lay a hand in creating the work how are they the artist? Finally, some traditionalists will also condemn the absence of plinths for minimal pieces (Archer 44). The piece is just another part of the room without something to frame it and set it apart. Further some works even emphasized their relationship with the floor by sheer size or bulk. It seems that many are beseeching the artists, How can this be art? Plenty had an answer.
Many took the arguments of critics and naysayers and turned them around. So what if the work depends upon the viewer, they began. Minimal art not only includes the space it is in but also the people looking at it. One could argue that art is not art unless it is seen by someone just as sound is not sound unless there are ears to hear it. Minimal works require thorough examination and the quick glances of Greenberg and Fried were simply not good enough to do each work justice. They demanded that qualified design was well worth the recognition (Meyer 213-214).
Most critics feared the change in art style as minimalism followed abstract expressionism but many thought the change was important. They argued that art needed broadening and minimal works extended the potential of form and experiment. Traditional aesthetic attitudes needed a serious updating and thus minimal pieces got bigger, depended on the floor to hold them up and on the audience to give it meaning (Archer 46). Fried missed the internal relationships of a work but without them a piece can be seen as a whole and not ripped apart to be studied separately (46). The lack of content was also another way to show truth. When there is something represented in a piece the authenticity, the truth, of the thing represented is dependent on the rendering of that object or subject. Such dependence often led to falsified content in art and minimalists wanted to stay away from this affront to reality as much as possible. Additionally, the pieces were not trying to be metaphorical of offer those who saw them some spiritual truth (51). In this way, minimalism was the most true to form and reality. The artist Frank Stella summed up this argument when asked about his paintings he replied, “What you see is what you see (Archer 52).” Amidst all of the controversy and debate artists continued to create and show their work. Dan Flavin was one such artist and dazzled viewers with his works that used fluorescent white and colored light as his medium.
Flavin was born in New York in 1933 and as he grew tried a number of different paths. He went to a parochial school as a youth (“Dan Flavin”). As part of the Air Force he trained as a meteorological technician. A sketcher during most of his life, it was not until the late 1950’s that he went to Colombia University and actually studied art history. From there he worked in the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art while developing mixed media collages as well as contacts in the art world. In 1961, he developed his Icons series which incorporated incandescent and fluorescent light as well as wood, Formica, or Masonite. Later he worked exclusively with fluorescent light and forgo any other materials (“Dan Flavin”).
Over the years he worked with a limited range of colors: red, blue, green, pink, yellow, ultraviolet and four shades of white (“Dan Flavin”). He avoided any fluorescence that was flashy or neon. The way in which he arranged his tubes was also limited. Up until 1972 he only used straight tubes in lengths of two, four, six, and eight feet and after that he only added circular tubes. Despite these restrictions he explored the behavior of light unlike any other artist. He played with viewers expectations as mixed colored lights produce white (as opposed to mixed colored paint producing black), and using green as the most brilliant of his lights or red as his most subdued (as seen in his work monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death), 1966). The placement of his tubes also made the viewer address the room in a different way. He placed a work from 1964 entitled, a primary picture, at the edge of a corner opening into a hallway in the gallery. The piece met with open space and this was shocking and beautiful. Many of his pieces were dedicated to other artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Jasper Johns, and Henri Matisse showing that he admired work in vastly different styles and times (“Dan Flavin”).
Looking at what minimal art means to critics and artists is important in understanding the movement. The artist Dan Flavin was an influential and unique part of this movement. Delving into the many different opinions on whether minimalism is art and whether it is good art takes a thorough investigation of the time period, artists and critics. Art historians today still cannot quite pin down what it means to be a minimalist and if the move from abstract expressionism was an intelligent one. Personally, art exists for beauty and controversy and minimalism definitely fulfilled the latter role.
Bibliography
Archer, Michael. Art Since 1960. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.
“Dan Flavin: A Retrospective.” National Gallery of Art. 22 November 2007
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5.10 (1967): 12-23.
Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001.
Helena Hertzog
ARH 321
Professor Ivey
29 November 2007
Minimalism, Debate and Dan Flavin
With any new art movement comes controversy. As ideas of what makes art good or bad shift so do those comfortable in certain patterns and trends. The transition into minimalism was not an exception to this rule; on the contrary it has one of the greatest histories of controversy and upheaval in the art world. Minimal art has been assessed over and over and has many names, contributors and critics. It goes by ABC Art, Cool Art, Primary Structures, and Literalism. Those artists whom art historians associate greatly with minimalism include Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin (Meyer 3). Some of its greatest critics were Robert Fried and Clement Greenberg himself. There is almost no end to the many nuanced ideas about minimalism and what it strives to achieve. Many thought that it was not art at all while others screamed that it was. However, a general background of the sides would provide a good start towards understanding what minimal art is all about. This paper will do just that. Additionally, it will explore the specific ideas and works of Dan Flavin with his own personalized branch of minimalism, light art.
Movements in art are categorized and labeled after the movement has had time to fully transition and influence the art world. Minimalism began to make progress in the early sixties though it had plenty of preceding artists in the earlier years. In understanding why there was so much upheaval during the transition into minimalism it helps to look a little at what came before: Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollack, Willem De Kooning and others of the abstract expressionist era infused their art with emotion and expressive content. They were richly colored and full of artistic influence and subject. One can imagine then seeing works by these artists and then stumbling on something like Judd’s wooden boxes painted red and entitled, Untitled, and feeling pretty clueless (Archer 46). They were monochromatic and impersonal. Instead of being created they were simply engineered. Critic confusion can often lead to condemnation.
What is most surprising about the amount of debate surrounding minimalism is its resistance to being interpreted at all. Most of what we consider now to be minimalist art claimed to have no meaning at all except for the materials that make the work possible and the austere way they are arranged (Meyer 6). Most who experienced it wanted a lot more from their gallery visit than nothingness. They wanted subject matter and artists’ presence. Who can identify with a bunch of glossy blocks? However, it was this misunderstanding of minimalism that sparked the controversy. Most refused to accept minimal art as art at all so those proponents of it and minimal artists themselves were forced to justify and defend minimalism. Those who argued strongly for minimalism included, Lucy Lippard, Robert Smithson, and Mel Bochner. Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris also wrote at length about their ideas and works (6). However, one should look at the original complaints regarding minimalism before jumping into the rebuttals of the artists. Art critic Michael Fried wrote about how minimal art had become modernism’s biggest enemy.
Fried feared the loss of illusion in art. He was against minimalism as it strove, for some minimal artists, to shake off illusion and simply produce object after object. In his essay, “Art and Objecthood,” he outlined everything he despised about minimalism which he mostly referred to as literalism or deductive art. He began immediately to accuse minimalist sculptures as threatening to completely take over the art scene entirely ridding it of paint altogether (Archer 58). Such power he gave those simple minimalist artists! He also theorized that the whole minimalist idea rejected any kind of formal composition which rendered the art useless. Fried’s idea was that a piece without composition cannot be analyzed because it has no interior parts. Without internal parts there can be no relationships between them and this led to Fried’s idea of minimal art being ‘hollow.’ This hollowness is not in reference to the absence of a physical center but a compositional one (59). Because of this, he theorized, minimal artworks only existed for the audience and that was not enough for him. Even though he gave this power to the viewer to determine what the piece was about, Fried further claimed that these very same hollow pieces left the viewer isolated and distant from him or herself thus taking away the very power he had just bestowed on the audience. This lends to the idea that there is an actual minimal amount of art content in a minimalist work. Fried along with others claimed that minimal art was undifferentiated among itself and even when it was the differences were never at the hand of the artist but rather because of the source of the work such as studio or factory. One more of his final blows to minimalism was Fried’s idea that minimalist works were just not abstract enough (Meyer 233). This was a big claim to make as most art critics and minimalist artists believed any abstraction was symbiotic with form, a very important concept in minimalism. Abstraction led to innovation in form so if minimalism lacked abstraction it also lacked the crucial element of form which was unacceptable to most (223).
In the early sixties, as minimal art became more and more famous, or infamous, a new idea was attached to art. The idea of a work’s ‘presence’ became more and more important. This presence was a work’s ability to affect those not even looking at it (Meyer 232). One can feel the presence of a piece with a turned back or by even being in the next room. Minimal art, despite all its criticisms, had this presence and Fried would not deny this. However, he, unlike those others who admired minimal art, did not see presence as a good thing. This art critic was not to be deceived for he believed that presence simply meant a lack of aesthetic quality in a piece and that many who detected presence in a minimalist piece were simply fooled by the large size, shock value, or just sheer recognition of the work (232)! Size, he swore, was most definitely not art. Along with Fried, the formidable Clement Greenberg took an anti-minimalism stance.
For most of the sixties Greenberg chose to simply ignore minimalism. This tact led his staunch followers to believe that minimalism was not even worth the popular critic’s consideration. In 1967, he came down slightly from his abstract expressionist cloud and wrote “Recentness of Sculpture” which clued his audience in to what exactly he despised so much about minimal art. His most obvious complaint was that the idea of art had started to shift further and further away from actually resembling art. It was very important to him for ‘high art’ to be easily distinguishable from kitsch and simple blocks, angles and lines (Meyer 211-12). He also claimed that minimalism’s simplicity made it easy to understand and then consume. It was pure novelty, a nice prop in fashion and interior design. Its pared down shapes and bulky proportions were not particularly attractive to buyers, however. Despite this, Greenberg continued drawing parallels between minimal installations and decorations and insisted that only those who could not understand the complexity and beauty of formal art turned to minimalism (215-16).
Others attacked minimal art’s simplicity, also, claiming not only was it too simple to be high art that a person’s visual experience was actually decreased by the drastically reduced forms of minimalism (Meyer 3).
It can be difficult to argue such a point. Some argue that minimalism requires no contemplation as it is so easily absorbed in a quick glance. Pillars and tables are some of the most banal of everyday objects so why would one need to enter a gallery to see such similar shapes? It is as if one has entered a room filled with giant sized blocks that babies stack to develop motor skills. Others might call attention to the sterile white background of gallery walls and how they make everything more garish and signal that minimalism is just cold. There is a complete lack of warmth and life and personality to the sculptures. Still others moan that each piece represents something highly reproducible. This is one of the biggest complaints against minimal art. One can never be certain, without proof, that the credited artist actually built the piece with his or her own hands. What the audience loves so much about art has so much to do with admiration of craft. Onlookers find themselves thinking, where is the craft in minimalism? Where is the skill? If Judd and LeWitt can simply specify to others what they want but never actually lay a hand in creating the work how are they the artist? Finally, some traditionalists will also condemn the absence of plinths for minimal pieces (Archer 44). The piece is just another part of the room without something to frame it and set it apart. Further some works even emphasized their relationship with the floor by sheer size or bulk. It seems that many are beseeching the artists, How can this be art? Plenty had an answer.
Many took the arguments of critics and naysayers and turned them around. So what if the work depends upon the viewer, they began. Minimal art not only includes the space it is in but also the people looking at it. One could argue that art is not art unless it is seen by someone just as sound is not sound unless there are ears to hear it. Minimal works require thorough examination and the quick glances of Greenberg and Fried were simply not good enough to do each work justice. They demanded that qualified design was well worth the recognition (Meyer 213-214).
Most critics feared the change in art style as minimalism followed abstract expressionism but many thought the change was important. They argued that art needed broadening and minimal works extended the potential of form and experiment. Traditional aesthetic attitudes needed a serious updating and thus minimal pieces got bigger, depended on the floor to hold them up and on the audience to give it meaning (Archer 46). Fried missed the internal relationships of a work but without them a piece can be seen as a whole and not ripped apart to be studied separately (46). The lack of content was also another way to show truth. When there is something represented in a piece the authenticity, the truth, of the thing represented is dependent on the rendering of that object or subject. Such dependence often led to falsified content in art and minimalists wanted to stay away from this affront to reality as much as possible. Additionally, the pieces were not trying to be metaphorical of offer those who saw them some spiritual truth (51). In this way, minimalism was the most true to form and reality. The artist Frank Stella summed up this argument when asked about his paintings he replied, “What you see is what you see (Archer 52).” Amidst all of the controversy and debate artists continued to create and show their work. Dan Flavin was one such artist and dazzled viewers with his works that used fluorescent white and colored light as his medium.
Flavin was born in New York in 1933 and as he grew tried a number of different paths. He went to a parochial school as a youth (“Dan Flavin”). As part of the Air Force he trained as a meteorological technician. A sketcher during most of his life, it was not until the late 1950’s that he went to Colombia University and actually studied art history. From there he worked in the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art while developing mixed media collages as well as contacts in the art world. In 1961, he developed his Icons series which incorporated incandescent and fluorescent light as well as wood, Formica, or Masonite. Later he worked exclusively with fluorescent light and forgo any other materials (“Dan Flavin”).
Over the years he worked with a limited range of colors: red, blue, green, pink, yellow, ultraviolet and four shades of white (“Dan Flavin”). He avoided any fluorescence that was flashy or neon. The way in which he arranged his tubes was also limited. Up until 1972 he only used straight tubes in lengths of two, four, six, and eight feet and after that he only added circular tubes. Despite these restrictions he explored the behavior of light unlike any other artist. He played with viewers expectations as mixed colored lights produce white (as opposed to mixed colored paint producing black), and using green as the most brilliant of his lights or red as his most subdued (as seen in his work monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death), 1966). The placement of his tubes also made the viewer address the room in a different way. He placed a work from 1964 entitled, a primary picture, at the edge of a corner opening into a hallway in the gallery. The piece met with open space and this was shocking and beautiful. Many of his pieces were dedicated to other artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Jasper Johns, and Henri Matisse showing that he admired work in vastly different styles and times (“Dan Flavin”).
Looking at what minimal art means to critics and artists is important in understanding the movement. The artist Dan Flavin was an influential and unique part of this movement. Delving into the many different opinions on whether minimalism is art and whether it is good art takes a thorough investigation of the time period, artists and critics. Art historians today still cannot quite pin down what it means to be a minimalist and if the move from abstract expressionism was an intelligent one. Personally, art exists for beauty and controversy and minimalism definitely fulfilled the latter role.
Bibliography
Archer, Michael. Art Since 1960. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.
“Dan Flavin: A Retrospective.” National Gallery of Art. 22 November 2007
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5.10 (1967): 12-23.
Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001.