Minimalism
“When you see a
gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect.” (Andy Warhol)
“With the black
paintings, I was interested in creating a kind of work that couldn’t be
‘read’.” (Frank Stella)
“Simplicity of
form does not necessarily equate to simplicity of experience.” (Robert Morris)
“I am not
interested in hidden structures. All
the cards are on the table.” (Steve Reich)
Political Background
Signified vs. Signifier – Minimalism vs. The
Post-Modern – Surface vs. Depth
Malevich vs. Duchamp or Cage vs.
Schoenberg or Form vs. Content
Rose, “A B C Art”
(1965)
275 For,
although superficially Malevich and Duchamp may appear to represent the
polarities of Twentieth-century art--that is, on the one hand, the search for
the transcendent, universal, absolute, and on the other, the blanket denial of
the existence of absolute values--the two have more in common than one might
suppose at first.
277
Both
the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s
rationalist mind led both men ultimately to rejet and exclude from their work
many of the most cherished premises of western art in favor of an art stripped
to its bare, irreducible minimum.
It is important to keep in mind that both Duchamp’s
and Malevich’s decisions were renunciations—on Duchamp’s part, of the notion of
the uniqueness of the art object and its differentiation from common objects,
and on Malevich’s part, a renunciation of the notion that art must be complex. That the art of our youngest artists
resembles theirs in its severe, reduced simplicity, or in its frequent kinship
to the world of things, must be taken as some sort of validation of the
Russian’s and the Frenchman’s prophetic reactions.
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect on
art.” (Susan Sontag)
The new sensibility – Erotics
of art
Advanced Art = Potty Trained (you are able to wait
for gratification)
“The inexorable reductive ness of minimalism may
represent the final stage of the dehumanization of art…” (Strickland)
MINIMALISM – Music of the Signified
Began between 1958 and 1973
(depends on your orientation.) Some
consider Vexations by Satie as the
first minimalist piece; however, that predates the societal changes that define
minimalism’s importance.
Stockhausen, Berio, and
Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the
pieces of a bombed-out continent after WWII.
But for some Americans in 1948 or 1958 or 1968 – in the real context of tail-fins,
Chuck Berry and millions of burgers sold – to pretend that instead we are going
to have the dark-brown angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie. (Steve Reich 1987)
“In its simplest definition,
Minimalism is a style distinguished by severity of means, clarity of form, and
simplicity of structure and texture.” (Strickland)
The principle features of the
minimalist technique include… a continuous formal structure, an even rhythmic
texture and bright tone, a simple harmonic pallet, a lack of extended melody
lines, and repetitive rhythmic patterns.
(Tim
Johnson)
The process is the piece vs.
The Medium is the Message (McLuhan
reference)
!
La
Monte Young
|
! |
Fascinated by the concept of
the audience as a social situation.
Young was involved with many
“happenings.” Schwartz’s description of
one:
The breaking point seems to
have come with 2 Sounds of
April 1960. In one realization, Young
dragged a gong across the floor, while Riley rammed a garbage can against a
wall. This time the audience began to
curse loudly; some listeners, in an oddly mis-directed act of self-defense,
began to sing the Star Spangled Banner.
It was a happening that Cage himself would have loved.
Young – “the theater of the singular event” vs. Cage –
multiple events [Young “minimalized” Cage]
La
Monte Young’s Piano Piece for
David Tudor #1 Bring a bale
of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and
drink. He performer may then feed
the piano or leave it to eat by itself.
If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, the piece is over after
the piano eats or decides not to.
Composition 1960 #7 [Notated B
& F#] “to be held for a very long time”
Steve Reich
As
a matter of fact, most of the following “Non-Western” techniques may derive as
much from Reich’s youthful jazz studies as from his African Journey; it is
often difficult to decide where popular influence ends and non-Western
influence begins.[1]
Reich ...in a sense, I’m not as concerned that one hears how the music was made as I was in the
past. If some people hear exactly
what’s going on, good for them, and if other people don’t, but they still like
the piece, then that’s OK too.
Reich
insists that this chordal suspension technique was derived from studying the
second Movement of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (1931); in other words, it is
a method he learned purely by looking at Western sources. “For me, it’s a major breakthrough because
it (Variations) deals with a harmonic
language implicit in many pieces but never really developed, and unless I had
gone back to some traditional Western sources, I probably would not have developed
it myself.”[2]