Minimalism & Postminimalism

Dan Flavin

"Pure color" transmitted through flourescent lights. Contingent on space/electricity. Minimalism

Primary Structures

1966 early exhibit of minimalist artworks. Curated by Kynaston McShine

Happenings

A term coined by American artist Allan Kaprow in the 1960s to describe loosely structured performances, whose creators were trying to suggest the aesthetic and dynamic qualities of everyday life; as actions, rather than objects, Happenings incorporate the fourth dimension (time).

Fluxus

An international avant-garde movement that aimed to spurn existing art theories and aesthetics. Artists often gravitated toward performance art, or actions; and incorporated social activism into their works.

Michael Fried

Art historian, Best known of the Greenbergian modernist followers. Develops idea of some sculpture's "theatricality" in his "Art and Objecthood" essay (1967), Objects to minimalism's theatricality. Sees diametric opposition between good, evolved modernist art, and the bad, theatrical "objecthood" of much '60s art. the latter being "literalist" and ruinous to the former, because it is not "independent", rather, predicated on a relationship between the viewer and sculpture, as in the theater.

Anna Chave

Art historian. 1988 "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power" is a feminist revisionist history of how minimalism was promoted through masculinist rhetoric. Overthrows the supposed neutrality of the minimalist object.

Richard Serra Corner Prop Post-Minimalism

Corner Prop

ABC Art

Early (1965) name for minimalism, as designated by Barbara Rose in her earlier piece on the trend in Art in America. An "art of negation"

Specific objects

Essay by Donald Judd. In "Specific Objects" Judd wrote of a new kind of three-dimensional work that incorporated aspects of painting and sculpture but was neither. Judd always used this term, instead of "sculpture" or minimalism.

Shaped canvas

Frank Stella was the first painter to become famous for working on canvases stretched over non-rectangular shapes, that follow the linear contours of his painting.

Phenomenology

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy that studies human experiences based on the idea that human experience itself is inherently subjective, bodily, and determined by the context in which people are. Emphasized one's perception of "being-in-the-world." One's body and its symmetry are at the center of the subject's experience. Ideas informed minimalists.

Green Gallery

Minimalism, Pop. Opened in 1960

Dwan Gallery

Owned by hieress of the 3M corp, important gallerist and art patron Virginia Dwan. Supported many Earth Art projects.

Minimalism

Still very much dealing with modernist concern for purification, medium specificity, and anti-illusion, but also, a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Denial of expression, coupled with an interest in making objects that avoided the appearance of fine art; generally geometric works that purposefully evade conventional aesthetic appeal, and make use of non-traditional materials.

Post-Minimalism

Term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in a book by the same title; art that engages minimalist tendencies (repetition, modern materials, etc. ) but diverges from them as in their organicism, less machine-made appearance, or ephemerality, etc.

entropy

That all things tend toward equilibrium (totally run down, loss of distinction/enderty) in the 1st law of thermodynamics. Important to Smithson, who incorporated it into his works.

Site specificity

artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.