Minimalism

Minimalism is a movement in the visual arts that arose in the United States in the early 1960s as a radical response to the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism. Its aesthetic is built on the principle of extreme reduction: the removal of everything superfluous — illusion, narrative and the personal gesture — for the sake of the object's pure presence. The work depicts and symbolizes nothing beyond itself; it simply is what it is, speaking the language of elementary form, colour, material and space. Its formal marks are simple geometric forms, seriality and the repetition of modules, industrial materials (steel, fluorescent tubes, plywood, brick), the abandonment of the pedestal, a neutral surface without any trace of the artist's hand, and the importance of the real physical space and the viewer's body. Sculpture displaces painting: Donald Judd creates his "specific objects" — rows of metal boxes; Carl Andre lays bricks and metal plates on the floor; Dan Flavin works with ready-made fluorescent tubes; Sol LeWitt builds modular lattice structures. In painting Frank Stella proclaims that "what you see is what you see," and Agnes Martin rules her canvases with barely perceptible grids. The music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass is kindred to it. Minimalism radically changed the conception of the work, the author and the viewer, bringing art closer to architecture and design and preparing the way for Post-Minimalism and conceptualism. Its legacy is an aesthetic of silence, clarity and concentrated material presence.