Bricks in the newspapers
London, 1976. British newspapers were outraged by 120 firebricks lying in two layers in a flat rectangle on the floor. The Tate Gallery had bought Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII a few years earlier. Now headlines asked how public money could be spent on a pile of bricks.
The uproar shows how much Minimal Art challenged expectations of art. Andre’s bricks depict nothing and express nothing. They are simply there, in the room, drawing the viewer’s attention to the floor, the material and their own position.
What you see is what you see
At the end of the 1950s, Frank Stella painted his Black Paintings, pictures of parallel black stripes without gesture and without message. “What you see is what you see,” he said later. In his 1965 essay Specific Objects, Donald Judd called for works that were neither painting nor sculpture but independent things in space. He had boxes of metal and Plexiglas industrially fabricated and stacked them on the wall.
From 1963 Dan Flavin worked with ordinary fluorescent tubes that flood an entire room with coloured light. The exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York made the new direction known in 1966. The philosopher Richard Wollheim had used the term “Minimal Art” in an essay the year before.
The idea as artwork
Conceptual Art developed in close connection with Minimal Art. In 1967 Sol LeWitt wrote that the idea becomes a machine that makes the art. His wall drawings consist of instructions carried out by others. In One and Three Chairs of 1965, Joseph Kosuth placed a chair beside a photograph of that chair and the dictionary definition of the word “chair”. Which is the real chair?
In 1968 Lawrence Weiner declared that a work need not be made; its formulation in language was enough. From 1966 On Kawara painted the current date on a canvas on many days, each painting to be finished on the same day. The Hamburg-based artist Hanne Darboven filled thousands of sheets with numbers and writing movements, an art of time and counting.
Women of Minimal Art
For a long time Minimal Art was told as a male domain. Yet Agnes Martin painted delicate grids in pencil and pale colours, and Anne Truitt painted simple columns and stelae. Eva Hesse countered the rigour of her colleagues with soft, hanging forms of latex and fibreglass and became one of the leading figures of what is known as Post-Minimalism.
Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Leverkusen
For Europe, the Rhineland became the gateway to this art. In October 1967 Konrad and Dorothee Fischer opened their gallery in a former passageway in Düsseldorf’s old town with works by Carl Andre. They soon showed Judd, LeWitt, Weiner and many others, often for the first time in Europe. At the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, the director Paul Wember exhibited American Minimalists early on. In 1969 came the exhibitions Konzeption/Conception in Leverkusen and When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern. The Fischers’ collection went to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 2016.
Why it still matters
Minimal and Conceptual Art posed the question “What is art?” anew in a radical way, building on Duchamp. They made space, the viewer and the idea into the work. Installation, Land Art and many forms of contemporary art build on them.
Further reading
- Gregory Battcock (ed.): Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (1968).
- Lucy R. Lippard: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973).