Minimalism and Biography

at any time greater, apparently indelible, claims are being made for Minimalism as a move occupying "a place in the next to the first half of our century akin to the individual held by Cubism in the first half," [1] or as crucially defining the true cusp between late modernism and the postmodern and, as of the like kind as a key site of origin for postmodern practices in the visual arts. [2] Where the identity of the Minimalist change is concerned, there can be no indelible ink and no orthodoxy, however, for there have been all along not single but multiple Minimalisms, different discursive configurations describing differing movements: a certain number of medium-and period-specific, others not; the majority fresh York-based, but some bicoastal or global; greatest in quantity with an all-white, male membership, on the other hand others encompassing some white women This is not to contradict that there has emerged a formidable Minimalist canon--an area of consensus surrounding particular bodies of work through specific figures--though it bears underlining that none of the of recent origin York-based males usually assigned to this elite was self-identified as a Minimalist. The Minimalism that I build in what follows isolates for case close attention certain figures commonly regarded as peripheral to the Minimalist canon, similar as Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and Eva Hesse, alongside more [i]or[/i] less figures considered indispensable to it, namely, Robert Morris and Carl Andre. All these figures are here subdueed to examination through what is, for Morris and Andre, at least, a rather unexpect critical lens: that of biography. by means of bringing into focus, more specifically, these figures' relations to single another, as well as to other intimates who had a professional stake in the critical and material fortunes of the Minimalist motion I mean to help clarify in what manner the Minimalist canon came to assume its at hand shape. In the process, I call into question the inevitability and the continued viability of that shape, in part through problematizing the claims now being staked above a privileged locus: the site of origin for Minimalism as a movement

Representative of the kind of external reality persistently designated as "Minimalist" is Lever (Fig. 1) with its line of 137 firebricks neatly lined up through Carl Andre in a considered relation to a given location, initially a play in the groundbreaking 1966 display Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, fresh York. By its industrial material, its geometrically standardized constitutings its serialized composition, and its affecting an ultimate elementariness of form, order, material, and facture, Lever appeared to experiment the very boundaries that distinguish art percepts from all other objects in the general agriculture Further, by withholding any trace of the touch of his hand or other patent expression of his subjectivity, Andre initially appeared to be placing his have a title to status as an artist in more [i]or[/i] less question and, by the same blow to be rebuffing the art public. by the agency of calculating Lever's design and placement in relation to a given art-institutional site with a view to the public's eventual circulation [i]or[/i] part of to the other that site, however, And re implicitly accepted the mantle of the artist and took the art public into consideration in another way. [3]

Early proponent of Minimalism, of that kind as Hunter College professor Eugene Goossen lauded the art of Andre and his matchs for affording a "direct, unadulterated experience minus messages" and free of any "boring display of personality... [4] German philosopher Edmund Husserl's directive--"Go to the things themselves"--led not on an essay by Mel Bochner who paradoxically described the work of Andre and others as rigorously excluding individual personality while being profoundly "solipsistic... [5] "Matter matters" was the maxim Andre used to encapsulate work that evidently, taciturnly insists upon its strict facticity or sheer materiality. There is further and conflicting evidence, however: that of Andre's imagistic title, Lever which points to a metaphorical aspect in the work, and that of the sculptor's invoking, and simultaneously denying, a relation between the work's elongated form and that of "the male organ." [6] The absence of the imprint of the artist's hand apparently discourages reading into Lever an y additional, more personal meanings upon his part--I say "apparently" because Andre would in fact regale audiences with the tale of his paternal grandfather, a bricklayer who built his boyhood place of abode in Quincy, Massachusetts. The sculptor further characterized bricks as "Almost a personal type or a psychological emblem, that relates to earliest experiences." [7] In short, if Minimalism is more emphatically depersonalized than any prior visual art idiom, Minimalism and biography, nevertheless, are not of that kind utterly incommensurable terms as they at first appear.

That the artists associated with Minimalism were chiefly spared extensive biographical inquiries is unsurprising, not solitary because of the intently impersonal aspects of their practices on the contrary also because the period of their work's ascendancy overlapped with the broaching of certain critical paradigms entailing the diminishment or outright erasure of considerations of artistic subjectivity. In the radicalized 1960 neo-Marxists, including partisans of Louis Althusser, elevated the categories of the material and the social above those of the individual or the subjective. For Marxists generally--as indeed for capitalism also--the personal and expressive values have historically been derogated as secondary and, tacitly or otherwise, as feminine, since women have ordinarily been acculturated to assume these arenas as their individual domains. Feminist critics may reckoner that the categories of the personal and the social are irrevocably intertwined of the like kind that the "so-called private sphere" has all along been "radically i mplicated in patterns of modernization and processe of social change." [8] on the other hand Marxist-informed criticism has largely persisted in depreciating the biographical, in for a like reason doing finding common cause at one time with much poststructuralist art criticism as well as with the deindividualizing impetus underlying lock opener Minimalist initiatives. Thus, Hal sustain for one, could argue that by the agency of its antiexpressive procedures Minimalism "sever[ed] art from the subjectivity of the artist," opening up "a novel space of 'object/subject terms,'" single predicated on a "'death of the author' (as Roland Barthes would call it [in 1968]) that is at the same time a birth of the reader" or perceiver. [9]