Beginning in the 1960s, artists like Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, and Joel Shapiro reacted against the flamboyance and self-indulgence of Abstract Expressionism by pursuing materials, forms, and procedures that remove the personal mark of the fabricator The art they produced has been called obstinately cerebral and unapproachably cold by some, but revolutionary by others, who recognized an unprecedented immediacy in it. This book examines how the Minimalists removed illusion and habits of perception from their art, essentially starting with nothing, and forced viewers to do the same. Illustrated with works ranging from small-scale sculpture to massive earthworks, the text traces the trends Minimalism succeeded, as well as those that succeeded it. The result is comprehensive critical history of one of the century's most important and long-lived art movements.
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From Publishers Weekly
According to Baker, minimalist art is much more than a supercool pose: it is a spasm of revolt, and in its urge to clarify esthetic experience, it is rooted, he claims, in American pragmatism, with distant links to Shaker folk art and utopian social experiments like the Oneida and Brook Farm communities. Yet he notes that the "patent silence" of minimalist sculpture may be its chief value in a culture overwhelmed by trivial distractions. This readable, perceptive survey by the San Francisco Chronicle 's art critic takes a refreshingly undogmatic approach, amplified with 40 color and 80 black-and-white plates. In assessing Dan Flavin's emotionally charged fluorescents, Richard Serra's "prop pieces" on the verge of collapse, Bruce Nauman's deadpan satires, Sol LeWitt's intricate lattices suggestive of crystals or city plans, and works by Eva Hesse, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Joel Shapiro et al., Baker broadens our awareness of the many unpredictable forms the minimalist impulse can take.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This thoughtful, well-written book offers a clear, concise look at an art that reveals no personal touch but has an immediacy that challenges the viewer. Examining Minimalism's major figures--primarily the sculptors--Baker celebrates the movement's elegant relationship with the past, evident in Shaker plainness and Sheeler precisionism, and predicts its demise as Neo-Geo, simulation, and mass-produced, smugly overblown products begin to dominate. He thus traces a shift from "an art that excludes the unnecessary to a culture so overcoded and content-addled that even the most trivial and passing forms and happenings appear to carry messages." A philosophical, provocative quesioning of aesthetic values and a comment on the social, political, and economic tenor of the American art scene; highly recommended.
- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum Lib., New York
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum Lib., New York
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Minimalism: much ado about almost nothing,
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This review is from: Minimalism: Art of Circumstance (Abbeville Modern Art Movements) (Hardcover)
Mies van der Rohe said that "less is more" and that a "house is a machine for living in." I do not find that true for an entire house, but it is manifestly true for a kitchen with its many appliances, the most functional of rooms.
I recently redecorated my kitchen, and was inspired by the minimalist kitchen designs of John Pawson, Simon Conder, Katsufumi Kubota and Eichinger oder Knechtl. I found their emphasis on functionality and simple rectangular geometry to offer an uncluttered, clean and pleasing ambience for what is essentially a work room. My black volcanic-glass counter tops and stainless steel appliances contrast starkly with the whiteness of the walls and floor, all of which which are brightened by the illuminating fluorescent lighting above a light-refracting translucent drop ceiling. Minimalist books like this one should be more minimalist; they are cluttered with philosophical verbosity. I have a master's degree in philosophy, and found the references to the philosophies of Rene Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Gilbert Ryle, Michel Foucault, et. al. to be utterly pretentious. There is no relation between such philosophizing about minimalist "art" and my rewarding aesthetic experience of the minimalism I implemented in my kitchen. Minimalist architectural design and decorative style is elegant. Minimalist "art" is a failed experiment in aesthetics, and all the artists' and commentators' loquacious philosophizing about it is just rationalization for the emperor's new clothes.
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