Minimal MoMA
Donald Judd: Untitled, 1961-78, Deutsche Bank Collection, ©Art Judd
Foundation. Licensed by VAGA, NY / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
American minimalist artists rebelled in the sixties with geometric forms and
industrial material against the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism. At the
same time, they began turning away from the European tradition. Critics
who saw an excess of theatrics in the works of Donald Judd or Robert
Morris rebuked the Minimalists for doing this. Harald Fricke writes
about an art form known for its “less is more” approach and that the
Museum of Modern Art began collected in its beginning stages.
Sol LeWitt: Serial Project, I (ABCD), 1966. Photo: Maria Morais, © VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
The exhibition has
about another two months to go. Then, with
Das MoMA in Berlin, one of the most successful presentations of Modern
Art comes to an end. The lines of visitors still wind their way around the
Neue Nationalgalerie, and friendly helpers are there to supply small
complimentary folding chairs for the three-hour wait. All the while before
you finally reach the entrance from the outer perimeter, there is a
wonderful view of the glass building of the
Museum of Modern Art’s collection. If you are on the south side
you can marvel at the complex axles and angles used by
Tony Smith for his geometric sculpture Free Ride; and
Walter de Maria’s Cage II (1965) made of chromium plated
steel rods can be seen at its best from the back of the building. It
almost seems as if
Mies van der Rohe intended a direct encounter with art from the early
sixties when he was planning the end phase of the building in the summer
of 1968. In fact you could hardly imagine a better compliment to the
reduced architecture of glass, grey granite and steel pillars then the
Minimal Art of the same period. “
Less is more” was the credo of the former
Bauhaus master Mies van der Rohe; and most of the sculptures selected by
MoMA were conceived exactly according to that principle. They can be seen
in the upper hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie until September 19th.
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Walter de Maria: Cage II, 1965;
Stainless Steel.
Photo: Maria Morais
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Nevertheless this art movement, which along with
Pop Art was the most influential of the sixties, does not owe its name at
all to the relationship with architecture. In January 1965, the New York
art historian
Richard Wollheim first used the term in the art publication
Arts Magazine. Wollheim wrote that 20th century art since the time
of
Marcel Duchamp’s
ready-mades had been working toward a radical cutback and packaging of
their aesthetic methods — which he felt could be seen in
Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, as well as in the work of
Robert Rauschenberg. In his thesis he even refers to
Stephane Mallarmé, who once expressed his desperation at a blank
piece of white paper. In Wollheim’s opinion, the French poet could just
have easily left the piece of paper in its naked state — as a symbol of
the inner struggle. That would have been, according to the art historian,
“an extreme example for what I call Minimal Art”. The minimum becomes here
the maximum of artistic self-experience, becomes the consolidation of
something that cannot be communicated by anything other than emptiness —
because pure intellect is revealed in the absence of images.
Carl Andre: 144 Lead Square, 1969. Photo: Maria Morais, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2004
Of course this example describes a
borderline situation. Yet Wollheim is not merely interested in the
meanderings of absolute artistic freedom, in other words, to show that
there is nothing to see — as
Socrates had already suspected of himself: “I know that I know nothing”.
What has been a canon among philosophical mediations for over 2,500 years
has triggered much more dispute in art. Minimal Art was criticized for its
rejection of the figure and its colorful play of abstraction not only by
the masses, but also by the critics.
Donald Judd: Untitled, 1968. Photo: Maria Morais, ©Art Judd Foundation.
Licensed by VAGA, NY / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
Donald Judd and
Robert Morris stopped producing their own boxes of steel, aluminium,
copper and mirrors and allowed professional firms to take over the entire
production.
Carl Andre laid out square panels of lead on the floor which he understood
as both plinth and object at once and used bricks to construct plank-like
rows that blocked off the gallery space.
Sol Lewitt used white enamelled aluminium for his series Serial
Projects (ABCD) that was arranged into cuboids. Rectangles and simple
geometrical shapes now triumphed everywhere now, after the excesses of
Abstract Expressionism, and the art world asked itself, baffled as they
were at the time of Marcel Duchamp’s notorious
Urinal, is this really art? The technical everyday and the mass
products of American industrial culture completely took over the museum.
Where Pop Art took over the image world of advertising, television and
Hollywood glamour with eye-winking irony, and reproduced each tiny
banality as “larger than life”, the art itself in Minimal Art was now just
one object among many. Instead of icons, now there were plain and simple
things on a search for “the thing itself”.
Some artists
were no longer sure about how to define their own work. When
Dan Flavin débuted with his neon tube installations in 1964 at the New
York
Green Gallery, he was not even certain what kind of art it was — he
definitely did not see the arrangements very related to sculpture in the
traditional sense of the term. “My own plan was above all a room routine,
to install fluorescent lighting.
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