Posts Tagged ‘Minimalism’
“Send me a postcard”*…
Ellsworth Kelly was a major figure in American modern art. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting and Color Field painting, he was a leading Minimalist. But as Hyperallergic reminds us, he also worked in– on, with– postcards…
From the late 1940s to 2005, Ellsworth Kelly produced some 400 photo-based works using ordinary, mass-market postcards as the substrate. Handfuls of these gems of the art of collage are tucked into various Kelly monographs and other books; Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards, at the Tang Museum through November 28, assembles 150 of them, and the accompanying catalogue includes dozens more. The spirit of playful improvisation is up front in these works, their range of figural and genre references experimental in spirit, their facture seemingly unlabored (sometimes downright scrappy). Delightful in themselves, they compel reconsideration of the late, great artist’s more austere, visually refined abstractions with an awareness of both his sense of humor and his sense of place…
An appreciation– and more wonderful examples– at “The Unexpected Humor of Ellsworth Kelly,” from Stephen Maine in @hyperallergic.
* Shocking Blue, “Send Me A Postcard“
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As we contemplate collage, we might send expressive birthday greetings to Benny Andrews; he was born on this date in 1930. An activist and educator, he is primarily remembered as an artist, especially for his expressive, figurative paintings that often incorporated collaged fabric and other material. A minimalist (like Kelly), Andrews was interested not in how much he could paint, but how little.
See more of his work here.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”*…
We are addicted to accumulation. The minimalist lifestyle seems like a conscientious way of approaching the world now that we have realised that materialism, accelerating since the industrial revolution, is literally destroying the planet…
Minimalism, I came to think, is not necessarily a voluntary personal choice, but an inevitable societal and cultural shift responding to the experience of living through the 2000s…
The iPhone’s function depends on an enormous, complex, ugly superstructure of satellites and undersea cables that certainly are not designed in pristine whiteness. Minimalist design encourages us to forget everything a product relies on and imagine, in this case, that the internet consists of carefully shaped glass and steel alone…
The phrase describes the alienated presence that we feel when we are aware of both our individual physical bodies and our collective causation of environmental damage and climate change. While we calmly walk down the street, watch a film or go food shopping, we are also the source of pollution drifting across the Pacific or a tsunami in Indonesia. The second body is the source of an unplaceable anxiety: the problems are undeniably our fault, even though it feels as if we cannot do anything about them because of the sheer difference in scale…
It is easy to feel like a minimalist when you can order food, summon a car or rent a room using a single brick of steel and silicon. But in reality, it is the opposite. We are taking advantage of a maximalist assemblage. Just because something looks simple does not mean it is; the aesthetics of simplicity cloak artifice, or even unsustainable excess.
This slickness is part of minimalism’s marketing pitch. According to one survey in a magazine called Minimalissimo, you can now buy minimalist coffee tables, water carafes, headphones, sneakers, wristwatches, speakers, scissors and bookends, each in the same monochromatic, severe style familiar from Instagram, and often with pricetags in the hundreds, if not thousands. What they all seem to offer is a kind of mythical just-rightness, the promise that if you just consume this one perfect thing, then you won’t need to buy anything else in the future – at least until the old thing is upgraded and some new level of possible perfection is found.
From the ‘KonMari method’ to Apple’s barely-there design philosophy, we are forever being urged to declutter and simplify our lives. But does minimalism really make us any happier? “The empty promises of Marie Kondo and the craze for minimalism.”
Via Patrick Tanguay’s Sentiers
* Albert Einstein
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As we cathect on curation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1790 that Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin demonstrated his invention, the guillotine, for the first time, in Paris. An opponent of capital punishment, Guillotin believed his device, at least, the simplest, most elegant, and most humane way to dispatch the punished. Exactly three years later, on this date in 1793, his device removed the head of King Louis the XVI.
The execution of Louis XVI (source)
Judd the facts, ma’am…
Donald Judd, was an artist, designer, and teacher whose work (largely grouped with the Minimalists, though Judd hated that label) has been featured at the Tate Modern and other museums around the world, and is on display at the Judd Foundation, in both Manhattan and Marfa, Texas.
In addition to Judd’s art, the Foundation displays, and via a “subsidiary” sells, furniture manufactured to Judd designs… and it displays Judd’s library.
And even cooler (especially for readers who can’t make it to the Spring Street location), the library is searchable online. One simply clicks on a shelf in the diagram of the layout…
… and sees the shelf in question….
… Mouse over a shelf (on the site), and a tab pops up identifying the theme of that part of the collection; click on a volume to see the bibliographical details of that book.
As remind ourselves of Groucho Marx’s insight: “outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside of a dog it’s too dark to read,” we might recall that this is a bid date in the annals of English letters… It was on this date in 1842, that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published Poems. While the future Poet Laureate had been writing for a decade, it was this two-volume release (which included “Ulysses” and Morte d’Arthur”) that made his name.
And on this date in 1925, Virginia Wolfe published the story of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway– one of Time‘s “100 Best Novels since 1923” (2005).
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