Minimalism

701 Words2 Pages

Minimalism

In order to understand minimal artists’ tendency to produce objects and not images, we need to define minimalism. Michael Delahunt at Artlex (1) refers to minimalism as “A twentieth century style of art stressing the idea of reducing a work of art to the minimum number of colors, values, shapes, lines and textures”. But I think this definition does not completely reflect what minimal artists did. They did not get interested in ‘complex’ things as colors, values, lines etc.

They preferred objects to images or I would rather say ‘brushstrokes’. Because that they

believed that “less is more”, even brushstrokes were too much for them.

Minimalists were against self expression. They wanted to use the meaning a ready made object already has in it. This was totally suitable for their purpose of using minimum effort and material for an artwork. Preparing an image would consume too much of the artists’ time and effort. And what’s more, it would have self expression in it.

They also believed that art could be concieved by mind before execution. That is, one must be able to explain an artwork to another who hasn’t seen it. For example Mohology-Nagy gave instructions by phone to a factory for one of his works(2). This can be thought as a instruction manual for an artwork (I think we can call minimalism as D.I.Y. art!). But you can’t do this kind of art with a painting. Can you think of it? “put some yellow there, mix red with brown and put it on the tree with ...

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