What we retrospectively call Minimalism and Post-Minimalism are two bodies of work that tend not to have the usual trappings of the art that came before it. Central to this work is an ambiguity, famously contested by Michael Fried, that sets it apart from other work in the museums. While Fried's argument continues to be vital for any understanding of art since the late 1960s, another feature of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism appears especially prescient.
Minimalist and Post-Minimalist work lacks pictures. Most people look for pictures first when they look at art. This tends to engender a discussion about what the work depicts rather than how to characterize the work's features. Our patterns of speech betray this habit every time we remark that a painting is “a beautiful picture of…” a landscape, a woman or a piece of fruit. The Pictures-first approach is problematic because we try to match what we are seeing to what we have already seen, a habit for which Minimalist and Post-Minimalist works are particularly ill-suited. Instead, they offer us the opportunity to see by presenting themselves rather than representing something else.
This difference intimates that even after 50 years Minimalism and Post-Minimalism continue to be radical. The absence of pictures is the reason that this work tends to be so difficult even for some avid museum-goers. I am not suggesting that this work offers us a purer or more real experience than other kinds of art. Instead, it offers us the opportunity to reckon with issues bound up in sensation. I think this reckoning is valuable and also that it is much more easily avoided, due to our habits of language and sight, in earlier work.
A work by Judd or Ryman, though it may appear simple, lays bare in fullness the complexity of our sensation in relation to the work’s physical characteristics and relationships. The simplicity of the work also allows us to realize how complicated even a single line, a white field, or a row of metal boxes can be or how simultaneously necessary and arbitrary the way and place a work is attached to the wall. These observations open to the meaning of the work.
For those unacquainted with or unmoved by Minimalist and Post-Minimalist work this argument still might not be persuasive. Their doubts remain: The aesthetic is too industrial and impersonal (Judd). My kid could paint that (Ryman). It’s just a tangled blob of string (Hesse and Morris). Minimalism and Post-Minimalism don’t attempt to answer any of these objections because they aren’t animated by their underlying assumptions. In rejoinder I’d like to suggest that the choice of non-art materials, absence of artisanal touches and apparent simplicity are intentional, serious decisions made to underscore the artists’ commitment to questioning our entrenched habits.
The force of their insight depends on our bodies' ability to grasp the internal and external relations of the work and language’s ability to describe them in such a way that they render meaning for us individually and collectively. This process is less like reading and more like narrating. In a truly democratic manner, the experience, and the opportunity to narrate one’s experience, is open to anyone willing to risk it.
