Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features and core self expression.

In other fields of art it has been used to describe the plays of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the editing and stories of Gordon Lish and the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.

Ad Reinhardt summed up the style in these terms: 'The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.'

The Term - Minimalism

As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with the visual arts. The term has expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, for example the music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Terry Riley. (See also Post-Minimalism). It is rooted in the spare aspects of Modernism, and is often associated with Postmodernism and reaction against Expressionism in both painting and composition. Generally, Pop art and Minimalism are considered to be the last Modern art movements and thus the precursors to Contemporary art or Postmodern art.

The term "minimalist" can also refer to anything which is spare, stripped to its essentials, or providing only the outline of structure, independent of the particular art movement, and "minimalism" the tendency to reduce to fundamentals. It is sometimes applied to groups or individuals practicing asceticism and the reduction of physical possessions and needs to a minimum.

Exploring Art Style

Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as "literalism" and "ABC Art," emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it.

As artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1977 catalog essay Last Exit: Painting, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about Modernist Painting's reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, even though the term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as-such.

Abstract Expressionists Vs  Minimalists

In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by composer John Cage, poet William Carlos Williams, and architect Fredrick Law Olmstead. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in complete opposition to the previous decade's Abstract Expressionists. Very soon they created a minimal style, whose features included: rectangular and cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, industrial materials, all of which leads to immediate visual impact.

Frank Stella's Stripe

The first art specifically associated with Minimalism was Frank Stella, whose "stripe" paintings provided the first of the reductive works that would follow as "minimalism." Minimalist sculpture is greatly focused on the materials used (see Donald Judd, the early works of Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin).

Origins of Minimalism

The origins of Minimalism are in the geometric abstractions of pre-World War II painters in the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivists and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi (whose work was a major influence on the Minimalism of Robert Morris).The Russian Constructivists proclaiming the distillation was in order to create a universal language of art which the masses were meant to understand. It may have also supported the rapid industrialization planned for the massive country. Brâncuşi's work was much more of a search for the purity of the form and thus paved the way for the abstractions that were to come, such as minimalism.

Critisism

This movement was heavily criticised by the high modernist formalist art critics and historians. It was called futile, mechanistic, mandarin, elitist, circular, endless, entropic, pedantic and authoritarian. The artists of Minimalism were interested in how the rational categories of painting and sculptures were intriniscally delimiting and this is why many worked in 3-D and payed critical attention away from expression and toward process and materiality (i.e., time and space). Some very anxious critics thought Minimalist work of art was a complete misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture according to critic Clement Greenberg.

Michael Fried - Most Notable Critique

The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality".

In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, most evident in sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator transforming the act of viewing the work into a type of spectacle in which the artifice of the act observation and participation were unveiled.

Fried's opinionated essay was immediately challenged by artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated the following: "What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing--namely being himself theatrical." What Smithson meant by this was that Fried had in fact delivered "a long overdue spectacle" himself, and that Fried had brought on a sort of "fictive inquisition", or more precisely, "a ready-made parody of the war between Renaissance classicism (modernity) versus Manneristic anti-classicism (theatre)."

Artists

Other Minimalist artists include: Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Norman Carlberg, John McCracken, Erwin Hauer, Robert Smithson, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, and Anne Truitt

Also notable are the Postminimalist artists, including Eva Hesse, Hannah Wilke, Martin Puryear and Joel Shapiro. The hallmark of Postminimalism is the often distinct references to objects without direct representation.