Blunt Objects

By Richard Lacayo

Go to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles right now and you can see one of the most merciless cultural products of the 1960s, Carl Andre's 6 x 6 Den Haag Steel Lock, a mat of 36 steel plates arranged to form a black square. First assembled in 1968, it remains to this day one of the bluntest things that have ever presumed to radiate the aura of an art object--which may be what was bothering a recent visitor to the show "A Minimal Future? Art as Object: 1958-1968." The art lover, a guy who looked to be in his early 30s, with shoulder-length hair and a porkpie hat, gave the work a dirty look, furtively checked the gallery for security guards and then briskly walked right across the thing.

He may have thought that was a well-aimed insult. He probably didn't know that Andre actually intended the piece to be walked on. But that's how it is with Minimalism. It has a way of confounding its critics. Four decades after its peak years, the last and most rebarbative movement of High Modernism turns out to be durable stuff. Deeply embedded in the DNA of much of the art that came after, it has likewise become the vocabulary of choice for almost all monuments since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the semiofficial format of grief.

It's also the subject of major exhibitions in museums on both coasts, at MOCA and in New York City, where nearly the whole of the Guggenheim Museum has been given over to "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present." While that show focuses mainly on the same crucial years as MOCA's, it also looks back to earlier prototypes--Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, Ad Reinhardt's all-black ones--and forward to more recent artists who have slyly adapted what Minimalism first offered.

Though the original Minimalists didn't think of themselves as a school, to outsiders they always looked like one. Andre's steel plates and piles of bricks, Donald Judd's Plexiglas and wooden boxes, Robert Morris' big plywood L shapes, Dan Flavin's bare fluorescent light tubes, Frank Stella's pinstriped canvases--they all flowed from a shared premise. As much as possible, the art object should be based on a single form that announces itself all at once or on a repeated form that produces a similar effect. It should not involve varied surfaces or a balance of different compositional elements. It should appear manufactured, not uniquely handmade. It should not make a reference to any thing, feeling or idea outside of itself.

A more parsimonious art could hardly be imagined, which was, of course, the point. After the egotistical uproar of Abstract Expressionism, all that emotional muck, this was an art of exemplary refusals, starting with a negation of the artist's hand and ending with the rejection of meaning itself. Seen in art-history terms, Minimalism has a feel of the inevitable, the terminus of ultrapure formalism that Western art had been heading toward for centuries. With its high-minded indifference to mere pleasure, it can also look oddly like one more outburst of the American Puritan strain. Yet unlike earlier 20th century abstraction, it made no reach toward the transcendent. It had none of the utopian ambitions of Kazimir Malevich or the spiritual yearnings of Piet Mondrian. Judd's boxes and Andre's bricks aren't about God or the future. What they are about is "object-ness."

Where does that leave you and me? Confronted with something like Morris' Untitled (L-beams), 1965, a work that offers the barest minimum of mental footholds, the dutiful museumgoer will make the most of the opportunity to contemplate object-ness and then wander off in search of something a little less impregnable. And sure enough, it's there in both shows. You don't even need to go to lovely, "impure" Minimalist painters like Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, whose canvases are full of personal touches. In the Los Angeles exhibition, which was organized by MOCA senior curator Ann Goldstein, Sol LeWitt, a certified founder of Minimalism, is represented by his sculptural white grid structures of the mid-1960s, right-angle emblems of rationality that have always felt more like arid philosophical enterprises than works of art. But at the Guggenheim show, organized by curators Lisa Dennison and Nancy Spector, we get his intricate pencil-work wall drawings, madly fastidious decorative art presented in the disguise of high-minded conceptualism. (LeWitt conceives them but leaves it to studio assistants to carry out the actual drawing, removing the taint of the artist's hand.) In their orderly way, the best of them are laugh-out-loud gorgeous. His Wall Drawing 271 at the Guggenheim is one of thosea force field of pale color produced by laying a red square grid work over a pattern of radiating black circles and yellow and blue arcs. Your eyes could play in that web work all day.

But to make Minimalism something more than a philosophical pleasure, most artists had to go outside its orthodoxies. For Rainbow Pickett, Judy Chicago made a variation on Morris' plain beams but painted each one a different pastel color, which immediately sets off associations with femininity that the pure Minimalist object is expected to forego. It was that kind of thing that a later generation of Postminimalists would do--keep the language of simplified impersonal forms but restore associations to the outside world. At the Guggenheim is British artist Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), a 1995 piece made by casting the empty space under various chairs in colored resins. The resulting blocks, their sides bearing channels made by the imprint of chair legs, are lined up like good Minimalist boxes. But once you know that they represent the overlooked spaces of the world, they take on a modest measure of poignancy. Poignancy? If Judd had lived to see that, he would have crawled into one of his own boxes and shut the lid.