Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties Book

Loved it. It demonstrates how artists and art writers evolve stylistic categories, then slot art into those categories. Verbal disputes create adversarial positions until everything hardens into 'teams:' "It's This, not That!" So two boxes made by two different artists could belong to two different 'teams' based on the theory behind them.

A great source of confusion is that critics had different definitions for similar terms; so, Michael Fried's idea of modernism wasn't exactly the same as Clement Greenberg's idea of modernism. Artist Donald Judd didn't think of literalism the same way artist Robert Morris did. Meanwhile, the same player (artist) might have been claimed by two different teams. "He's doing This! no, he's doing That!' In time, the arguments became so subtly convoluted that some critics were defending their own anathemas. Michael Fried, for instance, suggested that the literalists (Judd, Andre, Flavin) whom Greenberg disliked, were actually the true heirs of Greenberg's own theory of formalism.

It reminded me of the historical development of early Christianity. Everybody started from the same place, but the minor differences were argued and debated until they hardened into dogmatic positions. One of the final chapters deals with an essay by Fried that reads more like a treatise on religion than an art commentary. This pattern of evolution, I realized, has applied to many art movements of the past--abstract expressionism, for instance (Ad Reinhardt didn't want his rectilinear art to be shown alongside all those 'squiggly lines' being done by his colleagues.)

Incidentally, the name itself'minimalism'was not coined by the artists. It started out as a pejorative, as in "insufficient" or "this is the bare acceptable minimum of what constitutes art.' And because of their theoretical differences, they did not see themselves as belonging to one particular genre.

One final thought: Donald Judd was attacked all along for using fabrication shops to make his pieces, hence it was not 'art' because the artist didn't make the thing. This doesn't really make sense to me. Couturiers don't sew their own designs, nor do architects hammer up their own buildings…so what's the difference? sculptors have their work cast at foundries...and we all know the renaissance artists had ateliers of underlings who did a lot of the painting.

Lots of b & w photos and several nice colour plates. Book is not hard to read, I did it in two day-long sittings. Just try to keep track of who's playing for which team.