Text / Zhang Jiawei
Abstract:Post-minimalism develops along the path of minimalism. Robert Pincas-Witten divides post-minimalism into three phases that cover the history of the transformation of the appreciation of formal values in the United States between 1966 and 1976. There is a certain correlation and distinction between post-minimalism and minimalism. Post-minimalism is based on process art and retains the rational principles and ways of seeing of minimalism. The difference is that the artist's further focus on materials and techniques expands the minimalist interest in abstraction and anonymity, attempting to re-add the artist's personal sensibilities to the cold, rational graphics. With the development of post-minimalism, art has entered the stage of postmodernism, and the art and criticism circles have called for the end of art, and the era of pluralism has arrived.
Keywords: post-minimalism, process, epistemology, body art, conceptual theater
Art developed rapidly in the 60s of the 20th century, and when minimalism [1] appeared in the public eye, post-minimalism [2] immediately appeared. Minimalism rejects the overemphasis on the artist's personality in Abstract Expressionism, and uses non-figurative methods to avoid leaving personal traces in the work. However, the non-figurative method of creation obscured people's subjective emotions and gradually opened up the connection between people and society, and some post-minimalist artists re-injected human elements into their works, using more art forms to pay attention to social issues.
Robert Pincas-Witten proposes post-minimalism
In September 1966, American art critic and curator Lucy Lippard wanted to spark a discussion about the artistic stance that transcended the dominant trend of minimalist sculpture, so she convened a group of artists in New York who were paving the way for a new trend in art to curate an exhibition entitled "Eccentric Abstraction" [3]. The exhibition presents a number of works with a high degree of personal and sensual qualities, many of which continue the creative technique of minimalism, using geometric shapes, modularity, and repetitive compositions typical of minimalism, drawing on the traditions of surrealism, Dadaism, and expressionism, combined with unusual, soft materials, and the structure of the works appears relaxed and open.
Lippard wrote of the exhibition in a revised version of Eccentric Abstraction, published in Gregory Battcock's Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (1995) and in her 1971 essay collection, Change: Essays on Art Criticism: The growing influence of painting has weakened the tradition of sculpture and provided an alternative to the apparent dead end of traditional sculpture. However, formalist painting tends to focus on concrete formal issues, while eccentric abstraction leans more towards informal traditions, striving to open up new frontiers of materials, shapes, colors, and sensory experiences. It shares the perversion and irreverence of Pop Art. Of course, the generalizations made here and below do not apply to all of the work discussed. Its scope and diversity are one of the most interesting features of quirky abstraction. [4] It can be seen that, unlike formalist painting, many of the works in the exhibition explore new shapes, colors, and sensory experiences outside the tradition, and are characterized by a wide range of explorations and diversity.
The American art critic Robert Pincus-Witten noticed these changes, coining the concept of "post-minimalism." In November 1971, he first used the term "post-minimalism" in an essay on the artist Eva Hesse in Artforum. Post-minimalism describes a major artistic current in American art from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s of the 20th century, including artists associated with process art, conceptual art, land art, body art, performance art, and performance art.
Under the influence of the post-World War II consumer society in the United States and various social group movements, Abstract Expressionism hopes to emphasize self-expression through art, advocating the transformation of the question of "what to paint" under the concept of naturalism into the question of "how to paint". Abstract Expressionism changed the creative concept of traditional figurative art, separating the painting from the daily experience of the viewer, until it completely abandoned the traditional painting technique and used bold abstraction to express the deep emotions of the heart, pushing abstraction to the extreme. A group of minimalist artists who later emerged believed that the artwork was not a way for the author to express himself, and that the artists of the past often used the artwork to oppress the viewer's consciousness, which came from the artist's personal traces, hidden emotions and meanings expressed in the artwork, which would hinder the viewer's viewing and thinking. Minimalist artists advocated the use of non-pictorial means to display the most primitive form in front of the viewer in the form of the object's own expression, which formed a trend dominated by minimalist sculpture that Lippard wanted to transcend. Minimalist art pursues minimalism to the extreme, rejecting all representations and symbolic meanings, and rejecting all unnecessary interference with the subject, such as any sign of personal emotion, subjectivity, or authorship in the work.
However, art will not continue to develop along the path of minimalism, and from an objective point of view, minimalism excludes the artist's personal emotions very much, pursues simplicity and purity too much, and advocates rationality and the pursuit of the expression of the essence of things and goes to extremes, resulting in the rigidity and dogma of works of art and creative forms, and the lack of spiritual expression within the works. Through minimalism, art seems to be reduced to its essence. At this point, a turning point occurred, and post-minimalism emerged to contend with it. In her essay "Eva Heiser: Post-Minorism Towards the Sublime", Witten mentions that "Eva Heisser, in particular, has also contributed greatly to the emotional transformation of post-minimalism" and that "as Eva Heiser became more self-aware of her ambitions and found support in a small but growing group of similarly inclined artists, a series of different works emerged that contended with the architectural and sculptural aspirations of Minimalist and Modernism". [5] Post-minimalism pushes the rigid, closed, and impersonal nature of minimalism to handicraft and process, in response to the values of minimalism that prevail, cold, and serious, and attempts to re-add the artist's self-consciousness to the artwork and realize the emotional transformation of post-minimalism.
Minimalist is a geometric abstract style, and post-minimalism retains the geometric characteristics inherent in minimalism, but it is possible to develop different stylistic paths. Witten pointed out that thinking about an argument is not the same as creating a work, and that in the process of approaching things, the artist may be subjected to some formal intervention that affects the creation of the work, and that painting or sculpture is presented through this process. Witten uses "Post-Impressionism" as an example to illustrate that between 1880 and 1900, Seurat's classicized separatism, Cézanne's proto-cube spatial fuzziness, Gauguin's symbolism, and Van Gogh's expressionism developed together, but all four styles were under the parent style of "Post-Impressionism". "Post-minimalism", like "post-impressionism", encompasses a variety of stylistic paths and is one of the styles used to describe the development of a common root: minimalism.
Ideological characteristics of the three stages of post-minimalism
The 60s of the 20th century was a critical period for the development of late modernism to postmodernism, and Witten believes that the period from 1966 to 1970 was a watershed in American art, and post-minimalism was in this period, constituting a history of changes in the appreciation of American values. Witten summarized American art from 1966 to 1976 into three phases: (1) pictorial/sculptural mode; (2) abstract, information-based epistemology; (3) The opposite of epistemology, i.e., body art and conceptual theatre. 〔6〕
The first stage of post-minimalism, the "painting/sculpture model", which reached its peak in 1968-1970, was called "process art" by Witten because of its emphasis on the production process and the process as the main content of the work itself. The works of this period are a response to the cold, colorless work of minimalism and a revival of Abstract Expressionism, in which the artist refocuses on the artist's personality, color, and highly eerie dematerialized, open forms. Because each artist uses different materials, a personal identity is formed, the "signature substance". Lead by Richard Serra; Bruce Nauman's neon signs; Eva Hesse's latex, cheesecloth; Lynda Benglis's polyurethane foam, etc. Witten sees Richard Serra's lead work and Dorothea Rockburne's The Drawings That Make Themselves as processual.
Serra argues that the minimalist concept of creation forces the process to be completely removed from the work, but that the process is very important. "I've done lead rolls on the floor; I understand that I can roll up the material and it is still an object, even if it is mostly made of itself. Minimalist is completely detached from the process, and I'm interested in the representation of making, seeing, and walking. [7] Sierra preferred to use lead because of its heavy weight, malleability, and lack of lustre, which allowed for further exploration of the process. In the 1969 exhibition "Anti-Illusion: Process and Material" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Serra exhibited Casting (fig. 1). Using more lead to facilitate the removal of the solidified lead from the wall, Serra cocked 13 cooled and hardened lead blocks from the corners and placed them on the floor in order. Molten lead to a solidified solid form reveals the potential of the material. According to Witten, "the work offers the possibility of a continuous visual reconstruction of its production process, similar to the purely visual aspect of the work" [8]. The work done by Serra can be seen as a process of continuity.
Fig.1 Richard Serra, Casting, Lead, 10.2×762×762 cm, 1969, Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Sierra also studies the more pronounced structure of lead through various methods such as rolling, sawing, splitting, tilting, etc., but each has certain physical limitations. In Serra's eyes, these explorations are necessary. "In sculpture, you can't get rid of certain things: material, mass, weight, gravity, balance, place, light, time, movement. They are innate, and how you deal with them determines your achievement. [9] Serra refers to his works as "slow information," which embodies an exploration of the unique properties of material materials, which may be deformation or destruction for other artists, but formation and construction for Serra.
Dorothea Rockburn wanted to transform the equations she had been working on into materialized works of art. In Painting on Its Own at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, she folds and unfolds the carbon paper to form different shapes, leans it against the surface of the wall, and then uses a blunt object to draw on the fold of the carbon paper, leaving traces on the wall. The walls and floors of the exhibition space were painted with bright white paint, and the white paint on the floor was worn away by the footprints of the viewer, who left traces of his actions around the drawings, and the footprints became part of the drawings. Rockburn allowed these marks to accumulate over the course of the exhibition, and considered it "a kind of painting itself", where the otherwise spotless exhibition space served as a container for the viewer to receive, engage in a phenomenological experience. The whole process of the artist folding and flipping the carbon paper is a kind of contact with time, in which both the body and time are involved, so it is a process.
Eva Heater's work places particular emphasis on process. Heisher wanted to express himself through the use of highly chromatic, emotionally associated materials and a rejection of the geometric tradition of constructivism. In her opinion, the completely improvisational and unknown creative process is worth exploring, and she chooses all kinds of unstable, organic, and ever-changing materials in time and space as creative materials in her daily life, all kinds of fluid, soft materials such as resin, latex, glue paint, and thick and thin cotton. She wraps, bundles and sews the materials by hand, creating layers of hardening. In Right After (fig. 2), she dipped fiberglass rope in a latex bucket and hung it on an S-shaped hook cut from a regular hanger while it was still dry, hanging it from the ceiling and drying it in the air. In the process of changing from wet to dry, the latex either drips off the fiberglass or dries and sticks to it, drying into a hanging shape, and the change in latex fully reveals the process. In the view of post-minimalist artists, the final form of the artwork is not the key, but the process of the formation of the artwork, and the process itself is the whole meaning.
Fig.2 Eva Heather, Follow, Latex, resin, cotton, 152.4×548.6×121.9 cm, 1969, Collection of the Milwaukee Museum of Art, USA
The second stage of post-minimalism is "abstract, information-based epistemology." In the process of development, art has always been accompanied by rational interests. Minimalism continues the style of rationalism, emphasizing the rational component, ignoring color and form, constantly reducing the perceptual component, and finally retaining the geometric component and mathematics, and using industrialized materials, because industrial materials are mass-produced, and industrialized and mass-produced materials are geometric shapes. Rationalism also influenced post-minimalism, Witten says, "Around 1970, an information-oriented abstraction emerged, a loose respect for mathematical set theory, the 0-9 formula, the Fibonacci sequence, the 'golden section', or spectral-based color sequences, with a contingent analysis system emphasizing red-yellow-blue primary colors (rather than color selection based on sensibility)" [10].
Post-minimalism rejects the art form that appears as a monolithic object, abandoning the support of the shelf, and using strange materials as creative materials, hanging or hanging colored materials directly on the wall. And began to adopt a new compositional method, the artist no longer uses the mirror representation of realism, the empathic distortion of expressionism, and the expression technique of surrealism, but derives the organizing principle from the information-centered theory of knowledge, that is, epistemology, which reflects that post-minimalism still follows the principle of rationality and rationalizes and geometries beautiful things. At the same time, a renewed emphasis is placed on the choice of color. However, post-minimalism's choice of form, composition, and color is based on mathematics, and is an information-oriented abstraction. Witten was a great admirer of Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburn.
Mel Bochner explores the interpretation of information and the expression of space, using photographs, words and figures to rethink art and express an understanding of the world around him in an abstract and rational way. From 1967 onwards, Bochner worked on the "Surveying" series. He sees space as a place of rigorous and precise digital measurement, and he measures the architecture of the room and marks the corresponding measurements on the white-painted walls, such as the width of the window sills and the height of the door frames, just like the specifications on architectural drawings. Bochner's emphasis on the interaction of architecture and the relationship between the viewer and the building with digital measurement is done in order to evaluate the spatial parameters and the perceptual experience that unfolds within it, emphasizing the tangibility of space, a work that is not inherently meaningful, but one of the ways in which we express our understanding.
Mathematics is also evident throughout Rockburn's work. In an interview with Rockburn at the Museum of Modern Art, she said that she was influenced by the mathematical thinking of her teacher, Max Dehn, who was not a math teacher but taught artists how to think mathematically. Lockburn studied curvature, believed that everything moving in the universe was wavy, and believed that everything had a golden ratio to the human body. Bochner and Rockburn share consistency in the materials they use in their creative practice, the way in which they place their works, their preference for mathematics and set theory, and the rigor of their works.
The third stage of post-minimalism is the antithesis of "epistemology", that is, "ontology" (body art and conceptual theater). In 1968, post-minimalist artists rejected "epistemology" and emphasized the practical and dramatic cult of personality, making the body the medium of their works, trying to find the carrier of art in the body, and expressing concepts and intentions through the body, thus giving rise to body art and conceptual theater. Representative artists such as Lynda Benglis, Chris Burden, Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci.
Vito Akensey blends the body with art, giving the body a new dimension in different ways. Body art is more like a conceptual art of movement. He is fascinated by his body as a place, and the relationship between private and public, the self and the world around it, is a theme that runs through Akensey's art. Seedbed was first performed by Akkensi at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York City from January 15 to 29, 1972. Tilting the entire floor of the gallery and placing himself in a confined space under the ramp, Akkensi uses the sound of visitors walking above him to stimulate his own fantasies, which he conveys to the visitors in the gallery through loudspeakers. Akensey externalizes fantasy while constructing an environment that allows the viewer to enter his private world, where the viewer is both a spectator and a voyeur and a witness.
Witten argues that Akkensey's conceptual performance blends the notion of minimalist sculpture with the erotic connotations of Duchamp's later work, noting that "in Akensey's work, this is achieved by combining minimalist forms with Duchamp's thoughts and actions, and this fusion may be only short-lived, since the two positions are actually opposites." Curiously, this fusion did not form autonomous objects, but rather led to conceptual performances – which to date are considered to have come exclusively from the Futurist and Dadaist theaters of the First World War" [11]. Considering both his own existence and his absence, Akkensi is both an actor at the center of attention and an author off stage. Thanks to the ramp, the gallery space becomes a stage without any actors, only the participants of the event, the audience, and the conceptual performance explores ways to break down the barriers between the artist and the viewer, realizing a new type of communication between the artist and the viewer.
In November 1974, in an advertisement for Linda Bengris in Artforum, the artist wanted to explore the issue of pornography and feminism on a public level, hoping to abolish the distinction between men and women, in response to Akkensi's body art, and also a counter-to Robert Morris's advertisement for an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery. In Morris's poster, the artist wears a helmet on his head, showing the image of both a master and a slave. Inspired by Ben Gris's May 1974 exhibition "Metallized Knots" at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, this exhibition poster is a color photograph of the artist's nude body, which captures the moment Ben Grice stares back.
Through the analysis of the above works, it can be seen that on the one hand, body art and conceptual theater convey the artist's physical aesthetic experience, so that beauty has a sense of commonality; On the other hand, it influences each viewer, who perceives the world through the flesh and connects the self to the artwork through embodied experience. The French philosopher Marion said: "My body, as flesh, feels something that is not my body, and, under this separate condition, the power and impulse of this thing, in short, the presence of this thing, can affect my body." [12] The presence of body art influences the viewer's body and perception. At the same time, viewing is no longer the viewer's external gaze on the artwork, but the aesthetic generation of the artwork in the viewer's body.
The inheritance and innovation of post-minimalism
The reason why Witten called the new changes in art "post-minimalism" is that the art of this period not only retained some of the characteristics of minimalism, but also developed on this basis. The correlation and difference between the two can be summarized in the following three aspects.
First, post-minimalism continues the minimalist view of artworks. Forster explains the reorientation of minimalism in artwork this way: "Minimalism not only discarded the anthropomorphic basis of most traditional sculptures, but also rejected the placeless approach found in most abstract sculptures. In short, sculpture is no longer standing on a pedestal in isolation or seen as pure art, but is repositioned between objects, redefined according to location. [13] Minimalist redefined art, and post-minimalism continued this definition, which not only changed the form of viewing artworks, but also threatened the original and strict order of modern aesthetic disciplines that kept visual art as spatial art.
This change has led to a transformation of the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. On the one hand, the form of viewing the work changes, and the artist places the work directly on the ground, rather than standing on a pedestal or stand; On the other hand, it affects the visual perception of the viewer, who no longer guarantees a safe and independent space for viewing and appreciation, as if viewing a traditional work of art, nor does it re-examine and analyze the media attributes of the work of art. For example, the minimalist artist Donald Judd's Untitled (1967) consists of ten cuboids of stainless steel and plexiglass hung vertically on the wall, from which the wall becomes an integral part. The work has neither a pedestal nor a protective cover to cover the outside of the work. Judd eliminates the physical and psychological distance between the subject and the observer, allowing the viewer to look around the work, thus stimulating the desire to explore the artwork, that is, the perceptual effect caused by the special intervention of the artwork in a given place, the work can better integrate into the viewer's space and form a part of the environment.
Different from minimalism, post-minimalism pays more attention to the shaping of the space as a whole, emphasizing the interactive relationship generated by the audience's participation in the work. Many of the post-minimalist works are large in size and occupy a wide space, forming a specific "field", and all changes that occur in this field will be attributed to the meaning of this work. The artist relies on the huge size of the work to achieve a certain presence effect, which is external and aesthetic, and can make the viewer feel a strong impact in the space. At the same time, the artist provides the audience with an image that can be highly perceived and experienced, and the image of the work triggers the audience's perceptual experience, and the audience will automatically become the subject when grasping the object, consciously constructing a situation, and entering a situational space related to the work. The audience can immerse themselves in the work, feel the large size of the work, feel the divided space, and feel the concept conveyed by the artist. The audience can not only watch and appreciate the works, but also pay attention to the interactive relationship between the works and the space, the environment, and these fields. It can be seen that post-minimalism continues the new definition of minimalism, bringing together the purity of concepts, the perception of the viewer, and the contingency of the body.
Second, there is a change in the creative material. The materials used in minimalist creations are often non-traditional, non-artistic, as the critic Rosalind E. Krauss says in The Vicissitudes of Modern Sculpture: "These minimalist sculptures seem to reluctantly reject the creative intention of transforming decay into magic, and they seem to create works that aspire to a non-artistic state, to break down the distinction between the world of art and the world of everyday objects." [14] Therefore, artists often use industrial materials such as metal blocks, plate tiles, fiberglass, fluorescent tubes, wire mesh, polyester, etc., such as Carl Andre's iconic floor sculptures made of floor tiles, metal squares, and wood panels, Dan Flavin's works are mostly constructed with fluorescent tubes, and Tony Smith's sculpture "Die" is made of hot-rolled steel. Industrial technology and materials provide a unique medium language for minimalism.
Although the materials used by minimalism are far from traditional art materials, post-minimalism uses a more specific material—a softer material. Due to the soft nature of the material, the artist can freely change its form during the production process, so the work has a certain arbitrariness and contingency, and finally forms a rich and unique visual effect, which dissolves the preset and mechanical creative mode of minimalism. Eva Heater's artistic practice is deeply influenced by her personal upbringing, life experiences and illnesses, and her choice of material materials is mostly metaphorical or suggestive and culturally profound, such as Contingent (fig. 3), in which eight pieces of cheesecloth are suspended vertically from the ceiling, and the material is light, soft, and extended. The cotton cloth is coated with yellow latex, and when the latex dries, the cotton becomes stiff, and the cotton cloth undulates with the air currents generated by the body as it passes through the gallery, giving it a strong sense of form. Heather created this work while recovering from surgery for a brain tumor, and she connected the work to the lives of individuals.
Fig.3 Eva Heather, Detachment, Latex, cheesecloth, 350×630×109 cm, 1969, Collection of the National Gallery of Australia
Third, post-minimalism adds personal emotion to the work. There are no traces of the artist's handiwork in the minimalist works, and the traces are seen as a sign of the artist's personal emotional expression, so the artists do not create the artwork themselves, but use machine processing to create it, and they usually provide the artisan with his own ideas, and the artwork is made by the craftsman. Minimist artists always maintain a rational, indifferent, and restrained posture, and often use neutral textures, geometric shapes, and flat colors in their paintings, so as to simplify painting and reduce the painting language to just the relationship between color and form. In sculpture, the method of series production is used to strictly limit the expressive elements of each object, and the formal factors such as color and shape are reduced to a minimum. Donald Judd refers to a large number of his works as Untitled in order to prevent the title from distracting the viewer from the purely visual perception of the work. Artists believe that by doing so, they can remove all personal emotions and implicit meanings from their work, forcing the viewer to concentrate on the artwork they are admiring, rather than distracting from the artist's personality, and at the same time hoping that their art can be seen as an independent individual, not related to anything, and that only extreme simplification can capture all the sublime expressions in art.
Post-minimalism believes that the concept and method of creation of minimalism are extremely objective and calm, and it is the objective quality that occupies a dominant position in art, which makes people's subjective emotions obscured. Artists began to see formalist abstraction as an escape from reality, believing that minimalism had deprived artists of their connection with society. As a result, post-minimalism is based on process art, retains the geometric form of minimalism, re-adds the human element to art, pays attention to the artist's attitude towards materials and technology, and begins to use a variety of art forms to pay attention to social issues, rejecting simplistic sculpture and painting, rejecting works with simple structures, monochrome or luminous colors, and complex construction through sequence structures and grids. Post-minimalist artists visualize the process, movements, and emotional states of the artist's creation, endow the works with personal emotions, and give the indifferent and rational works an emotional temperature.
The influence and reflection of post-minimalism on the art world
In the third stage, art is no longer confined to a specific location, and artists try to break through studios, galleries, museums, and create anywhere, and the art of this period is often associated with land art, performance art, process art, conceptual art, and other forms of expression that resist the authority of a single artistic object. In her essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", Rosalyn Krauss argues that the meaning and function of this type of art is "nomadic" in nature, used to describe the art forms and artistic practices of diffusion, "The works that people discovered in the early 60s of the 20th century, sculpture has entered an absolute no-man's land: what is in front of the building, not the building, or in the landscape, not the landscape. "Sculpture transcends monumental logic and enters a state of placelessness, and the forms and practices of design installations, videos, and performances that have emerged later are increasingly not accommodated by traditional painting and sculpture.
The German art critic Ulrich ReiBer believes that the internal development logic and aesthetic form of modern art can no longer keep up with the times, because in modern art, art can only be called art if it is similar to previous artworks. With the development of post-minimalism, artworks have gradually deviated from the trajectory of modern art, constantly challenging the traditional concept of high art with new art forms, expanding the concept of art and expanding the boundaries of art. The artist continues to explore new possibilities of expression, realizes the transcendence of the material itself, chooses a wider range of materials, material materials have the characteristics of breadth and broadness, the centrality of traditional painting and sculpture is challenged, the pure and single artistic language is broken, easel painting is deconstructed, sculpture is redefined, ready-made (ready-made), industrial materials, natural materials, and even the human body itself can become the medium of artistic creation, and the boundaries between painting, sculpture and physical objects are constantly confused. "Art no longer requires much skill to make. They no longer need artists – anyone can 'make' art. Painting and sculpture, as understood by tradition, are increasingly less and less central. It's as if art has entered not just a new era, but a new era in which anything is possible. [15] New changes in art have made everything possible, thus dissolving the boundaries between art and life, between artists and audiences. This influenced postmodernist art, so the most basic way to grasp postmodern art is to exclude traditional aesthetics from the visual image.
This is a signal for the separation of late modernism from postmodernism. If art blindly pursues form, it will gradually become numb, so artists need to rethink what art can do. How does art relate to society? What role does art play in life? "More precisely, not the thirst for style, but the engagement with the content; It is not the pursuit of form, but the expression of essence and the making of things real and the creation of real things, and the questioning of their meaning. In short, modern art is an aesthetic revolution, while postmodern art is a revolution in ideology. [16] Postmodernism gradually became more open, with Joseph Beuys saying that "everyone is an artist" and "everything is sculpture" and Wolf Vostell saying that "art is life, and life is art". During this period, the boundaries between art and life gradually blurred, and everything could become art. This also shows that "the phenomenon of the concept of 'postmodern' itself advocates diversity, does not tolerate exclusive appeals, and rejects universal appeals." [17] From post-minimalism, diversity is the general goal of artistic pursuit.
As for the new development of art, the art world and the criticism circles have voiced the end of art. In his essay "Specific Objects," the American sculptor Judd declares that sculpture is finished, "because sculpture is not a very universal form, it may only be what it is now—which means that if it changes dramatically, it will become something else; Then it will be finished" [18]. Painting, sculpture and all other traditional arts seem to have run their ropes. The American scholar Kim Levin considers the art of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century to be "abesence", "when artists detached their art from common forms and materials, strived to break away from the museum system, struggled to resist form, style or materiality, and began to refuse to be creators of genius." Art tries to make it easy to understand, "For most of the '70s, the most interesting art was rarely where you would expect it to be, and it was almost always barely recognized as 'art'. In the decade 1968-1978, art did not disappear, however, it was hidden. Because it's ridiculous to try to be easy to understand, to try to enter the world" [19].
Arthur C. Danto, an American philosopher of art, argued that the art of this period had developed to a stage where boundaries were blurred, and the viewer could not directly discern the artwork and its meaning by looking at it. In fact, at this point it began to seem that everything could be a work of art, as long as it could be explained by invoking a theory of its status as art, so that one could not tell whether something was a work of art or not by looking at it. After all, the meaning is not visible. People can't tell if something has meaning or what it has by looking at it. [20] Danto proposes that "art is the end of the end", that art is finished, and that "freedom ends in its own realization." The art of subordination is always with us. The institutions of the art world – galleries, collectors, exhibitions, newspapers – are based on history and, from which new things are created, they too fade away" [21]. The end of art is not the death of art, it does not mean that artists stop creating, but towards a new beginning, the era of pluralism has arrived. Hal Foster argues that pluralism is postmodernism.
Post-minimalist art continues to move forward in its own development context, and artists gradually pay attention to emotions and concepts, extending art to process, concept, earth, body and performance, so that the theory of artistic self-discipline is challenged at different levels. But many critics disagree with the term "post-minimalism," with Stephen Melville, a professor of contemporary American art history, suggesting: "The term 'post-minimalism' is not particularly popular. While adjective forms have survived as a loose chronological way of picking out the range of activities and even styles, things like textbooks tend to reflect a phenomenon that disperses substantive forms onto other labels – 'land art' or 'body art' or 'performance' or 'process art' or 'conceptual art' or 'installation art'. [22] Because Witten's definition of post-minimalism is too broad, and post-minimalism includes too many art forms and covers many groups of artists, so it has not been recognized and promoted by other critics, and a certain art form with obvious tendencies has gradually been classified into other styles for discussion, such as the art world uses "land art" or "landscape art" to describe art related to the earth, and "body art" to describe art related to the human body. Art criticism has not continued to use the concept of post-minimalism. However, it is precisely the interweaving of different developments and changes that explores all kinds of new possibilities in art, modernism collapses, and postmodernism truly arrives.
epilogue
Post-minimalism takes minimalism as a conceptual and aesthetic reference and further develops it, presenting distinctive artistic characteristics. Post-minimalism uses simple everyday materials to represent geometric forms, sometimes presenting a "pure" formalist beauty, which are common concepts in minimalism. Post-minimalist artists are equally interested in abstraction and materiality, and they expand the interests of minimalists to create abstract artworks that do not have traditional expressive functions and have a strong sense of material presence. The difference is that the post-minimalist pursues completely different goals, and the post-minimalist artists borrow the anonymous language of minimalism, reject its naïve formalism, oppose the impersonalization and excessive indifference and rational characteristics of the early movement, and try to give art the quality of emotional expression again, adding human factors to artistic creation, which is also more expressive. The strong personal emotion is in stark contrast to the minimalist works produced by the machine, when the exploration of "objects" is taken to the extreme, and the abstraction is brought to the extreme, art returns to concreteness. With the rapid development of culture and the continuous replacement of artistic trends, it is the continuous exploration of art materials, media and forms by artists that gives art the opportunity to embrace more open forms, and every change brings new development to the art world.
Exegesis:
[1] Minimalism can be translated as both minimalism and minimalism, and this article uses the translation of minimalism.
[2] Post-Minimalism can be translated as either post-minimalism or post-minimalism, and this article adopts the translation of post-minimalism.
[3] Lucy Lippard organized and curated an exhibition entitled "Eccentric Abstraction," which was held at Marylin Fischbach's gallery in New York from September 20 to October 8, 1966. Artists represented in the exhibition are Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Gary Kuehn, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, Keith Sonnier, Frank Lincoln Wiener Lincoln Viner）。
〔4〕Lucy Lippard, "Eccentric Abstraction", Art Internationl, Vol.5, No.3, 1966, p. 99.
〔5〕Robert Pincus-Witten, “Eva Hesse: Post-Minimalism into Sublime”, Artforum, Vol.10, No.3, 1987, p. 34.
〔6〕Robert Pincus-Witten, Post-Minimalism, Out of London Press, 1977, p.18.
〔7〕Richard Serra, Hal Foster, Conversations about Sculpture, Yale University Press, 2018, p. 37.
〔8〕同〔6〕，p. 28.
〔9〕Richard Serra, Hal Foster, Conversations about Sculpture, Yale University Press, 2018, p. 34.
〔10〕同〔6〕，p. 17.
〔11〕同〔6〕，p. 143.
[12] [French] Ma Lirong, translated by Huang Zuo, The Phenomenology of Love, The Commercial Press, 2014, p. 210.
[13] Hal Foster, translated by Yang Juanjuan, The Return of Reality: Avant-garde Art at the End of the Century, Jiangsu Phoenix Fine Arts Publishing House, 2015, p. 48.
[14] Rosalyn Krauss, translated by Ke Qiao and Wu Yan, The Transformation of Modern Sculpture, China National Photography Art Publishing House, 2017, p. 202.
[15] Arthur C. Danto, translated by Wang Chunchen, After the End of Art, Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2007, p. 5.
[16] Ge Pengren, ed., Western Modern Art and Postmodern Art, Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000, p. 160.
[17] [de] Ulrich Lessel and Norbert Wolff, trans. Yang Jin, A History of Western Art in the Twentieth Century (Volume II), The Commercial Press, 2016, p. 9.
〔18〕Donald Judd, Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax New York University Press, 2016, p. 184.
[19] Kim Levin, edited by Chang Ningsheng, Xing Li and Li Hong, The Transformation of Postmodernity, Jiangsu Education Press, 2006, p. 3.
[20] [de] Ulrich Lessel and Norbert Wolff, trans. Yang Jin, A History of Western Art in the Twentieth Century (Volume II), The Commercial Press, 2016, p. 5.
[21] Arthur Danto, translated by Ouyang Ying, The End of Art, Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2001, p. 130.
〔22〕Stephen Melville, “What Was Postminimalism?”, in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold, Margaret lversen, 2003, pp. 156-157.
Zhang Jiawei is a doctoral candidate in the School of Arts, Hebei University
(This article was originally published in Art Observation, Issue 4, 2024)