What is Minimalism – Understanding Art

Originally published under my pen name: Steve A. Wolfe.

This is an honest attempt to answer the question What is Minimalism. As with most questions in art there is no easy answer and any two art historians are likely to give widely differing answers. Anyway, here is my shot at it.

Most of the great artistic movements can be seen as either an extension of a preceding movement or as a reaction to one. Minimalism falls into both categories. It was a direct and forceful reaction to Expressionism in general and to the raw emotion and anti-intellectualism of Abstract Expressionism in particular. Minimalism was, however, firmly rooted in one overarching movement of the time and that was Modernism, which had already started a reductive process. It also provided the bridge between Modernism and Post Modernism. Put simply, it sought to do away with all external references, especially emotional and historical, and to create art that was completely self contained.

Minimalism first appeared in the 1950′s in New York as a subset of Abstract art but became a dominant trend in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Many sculptors were associated with the movement and pieces featuring large flat planes, industrial finishes and industrial materials were common. Geometry was extremely important as this represented the most pared down representation possible, a form stripped of everything decorative but still retaining its essence. Repetition was also prominent, not only in sculpture but also in two dimensional art and also the other art form that embraced the genre,, music. This music tended to consist of repetitive pulses or small groups of notes with changes being very gradual. Writing also had its own drive towards the minimalism. Authors tended to use fewer adverbs and adjectives and didn’t describe everything down to the last detail which allowed the reader to fill in the blanks deliberately left by the author.

Minimalism was also hugely influential in design and architecture with traditional Japanese buildings being perhaps the most dominant influence. Design, by its nature, is functional, unlike the fine arts such as music and painting which by definition have no practical job to do. Architects embraced this with such novel concepts as making a floor double as a radiator and removing internal walls to create multipurpose spaces.

For a deeper understanding of the topic I recommend reading Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He answers the question, What is Minimalism as well as anyone, despite the fact that he never claims to be dealing with Minimalism per se, and the work itself is definitely not a Minimalist work, but one of the main themes running through the entire work is a discussion about the Romantic world view versus the Classical world view. The former represents the surface as being all-important, i.e. the decoration, the visible, while the latter argues that the appearance of something should be determined by its function and that this is where true beauty lies. Pirsig uses the motorcycle engine as a metaphor for the Classical world view stating that everything visible when looking at an engine exists purely as an offshoot of its function. Minimalism, however it is expressed, always comes from the Classicist viewpoint. It can appear to be a very dry academic subject, as most think of art as being about emotions and surface, but Pirsig’s novel removes much of the abstraction involved and weaves a discussion of a Minimalist philosophy using concrete examples into an book that, though very complex, is also a really good read.

I have deliberately not listed names of prominent exponents of the genre as I felt that this would make the article too disjointed and the names are easily available elsewhere. Also it wouldn’t really help to answer the question what is minimalism. I recommend looking up Minimalism on Wikipedia as a jumping off point as there are some extremely good articles on there written by many different people. As with any art movement there are many conflicting views, even among experts or maybe especially among experts, and the discussion pages allied to the Wikipedia pages will give an insight into some of these.