Alanna Spence
Minimalism Seminar
CCA 2007
Ponty, Flavin, Judd, Stella
Mauurice Merleau-Ponty’s article on body and perception reminded me of the short story, Flatland. The story is from the perspective of a being, from a three dimensional world, describing his visit to a two-dimensional world to another three-dimensional being. Ponty’s article brings up the important point that we rarely ever think about our perception of the world in the context of our scale, our senses, and our bodies. How we perceive the world, has a lot to do with how art is made. Ponty makes a comment that we see many different flat images that we construct in our minds into three-dimensional experiences. You could say painting represents the single, flat image, and sculpture represents an experience of moving in space around an object and experiencing many sides. As human bodies, we collect information from past experience. We make assumptions about the objects in our world based on prior experience. I assume a cube is a cube because I’ve experienced one before, even though I may only be able to see very little of the cube, my mind fills in the blanks. Illusionist art works on the premise that we viewers have experienced a similar world and will recognize the images being depicted. We can fill in the blanks. Minimalist art tries to remove the need to fill in the blanks.
The second reading for the week was an interview between the writer Glaser and Judd, Stella, and Flavin. The title of the article is curious to me. Glaser questions whether this new art is nihilistic. I don’t see anything nihilistic about it. It seems to me that these three artists were looking for something with purity and truth, something with no hidden agendas. They talk about wanting to find something new in art. But they are also keenly aware that painting is painting, you are still dealing with the same basis issues. They still want to create something tangible and real, they don’t want to just sell air, like Yves Klein. Glaser brings up a question of complexity. He says minimal art is dealing with less complexity than more traditional paintings. Stella compares a 19th century landscape with a Noland painting. With each, the viewer is dealing with “deep space and the way it’s painted.” Neither is more or less complicated. They are both looks for solutions to the same problems, and offer the viewer the same amount of information to consider.