Mini Mani Mo: "3 X 3: Flavin / Andre / Judd" at Leonard And Bina Ellen Gallery.
"non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem"
William Of Ockham
I'd love this blog to be minimal.
Yesterday I went to see the exhibit "3 X 3: Dan Flavin, Carl André, Donald Judd" at gallery Leonard And Bina Ellen at Concordia University (Montreal).
A selection of 3 works by 3 landmark minimalist artists, all works presented were from the permanent collection of the National Gallery Of Canada in Ottawa.
It was short, nostalgic, but I enjoyed it.
Slick, design-oriented, thoughtprovoking.
Thanks,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
......I can't really leave you this way, can I ?
Is there any such thing as bad minimalist art ?
Tough answer, maybe that is why they are still so many artists
doing it nowadays.
Yet to some, all minimalist art is bad: merely an invention of pedantic snobs laughing at the face of good-intentioned people.
There was a pretty heavy critic of the Bina Ellen show at the Voir journal by general onlookers, so much that I felt an urgency to reply over there, and explain why it is that minimal artists are so important (regardless of personal taste).
To be honest,I don't think that minimal art pieces by themselves are always that fascinating. I believe that what is truly fascinating in minimal art are artists' approaches on the subject, how they were able to focus on very specific points and respect them for a lifetime.
It is true that many of these specific issues are theoretical explorations that could hardly be repeated today (once something is said, it's said), unless in contexts of recyclage by the design industry, a field on which indeed minimalists probably had the greatest influence.
I'm thinking of this obsessive layering down of the basic "mathematics" of art, which was really the most evident here in the works of Dan Flavin and Carl Andre (to keep with the artists selected for this minimal survey).
As I mentioned elsewhere, and as you may all know, minimalists emerged at the convergence of two problematics:
1) Theoretically, aesthetic had been called obsolete (you like blue and I like
yellow, they are no critically pertinent common grounds on this aspect).
2) The industrial world was rapidly dephazing art on the level of material exploration and visual effect.
Therefore, deconstructing aesthetic in its most simple forms, and attempting to reach back the design world by erasing the human touch through the use of industrially fabricated material, became the main concerns of minimalists. Minimalists worked beyond representation, as they were aware that our world was already overwhelmed by it. Through their art they elaborated a thorough critic of the visual, turning back art unto itself, negociating its pertinence. Finding ways to create an art that would be logic, and essentially demonstrating visual parameters of perception, which we experience in everyday life.
In a sense, minimalist art was aiming at becoming "functionalist" art.A sort of strict, supra classical form of art that had an aesthetic purpose: expliciting the materialistic laws of art, not in the sense that it was all that theoretical, but more in the sense that it extended theory into an art that indulged into formulaic researches.
And the best way to experience these "formulations" is when you're able to see many works from one of these minimalists put together. "3 X 3" only permitted 3 works per artist, so I'm tempted to criticize the show from the educational standpoint of what could be learned about each artist from such a limitative context.
Let's see....
Dan Flavin:
Main Interest: Immateriality (How can one make a painting or sculpture out of pure light?).
One work was missing from the Montreal version of this travelling exhibit (Icon IV (the pure land) (to David John Flavin [1933-1962]), 1962-1969). It was required by the National Gallery of Washington for their recent Retrospective of this artist (which, by the way, will feature in my eventual top of the year 2004, something I expect to write somewhere in early march). What we were left with was the famous "Monument 4 For Those Who Have Been Killed In Ambush (To P.K. Who Reminded Me About Death),1966", a fine work but one that was already seen in Montreal during the "Global Village: The 60s" exhibition at Montreal's MFA in late 2003. It's one of those intermittent works of Flavin that attended to other preoccupations than plastic. It is not merely a canvase of light: you are invited to read into the cross format, something menacing that projects towards you. To me it looks like a canon or a hanging pole. The red obviously refers to violence and blood, and it would be ridicule to refute that reading, however literal it might be.
Some could argue that this work is not representative of standard Flavin interests, but it does serve him well as it proposes the audience how much can be said by the assemblage of a few neon lights. By itself, the work is reflective of Flavin's carreer.
The other work, titled "The Nominal Three (To William Of Ockham) (1963 )" couldn't be more representative of either Flavin's art or the aim of minimalist art in general. I have no intention to resume to you here the philosophy behind the "Ockham Razor" theory that it refers to, but let just say that the work itself is simply a demonstration of logical reasoning. It is the minimal format of a series. If you take one white neon, and install two more at a certain distance, it can still mean anything. You can read it in any direction. But if you add another chunk of three neons, at an extra distance, you get a serie, since from logic you can presume that the following set will include 4 neons, and then 5 neons, etc... The problem with minimalist art is that it deals so much with first-sight materiality that people tend to forget that these works sometimes hide such tricks behind their superficial outlook. What I just described sounds obvious to any real art amateur, but a great quantity of spectators don't expect art this demonstrative of its reason to be. Minimalism is a religious art that is fascinated by pure thought and the reductionism of all possibilities.
In all its godly white hermetism, this work just described reminded me that the major aspect lacking from Flavin's art in this exhibition was a work demonstratring his use of multicolored neon lights, and how he used to shape them as being the plastician of light that he was.
Carl André:
Main Interest: the expressive power of objects (what are the different configurations an object can take, between unit and its multiplication?).
carl André is the artist best represented by this exhibit. Not only his assemblage in series of a similar object, sometimes done by hand, is magnificently examplified by his work Lever (a series of 137 white bricks aligned on the floor in a precise row), but with the two copper works we are being demonstrated how André loved to reconfigure a same unit in all sorts of spatial possibilities (and sometimes shifting materials to explore even further visual possibilities). Here we are shown "144 Copper Square (1969)", a floor of 12 x 12 copper thin squares that visitors are invited to walk on, and in a room nearby, "Pile" (1977) , a serious amount of the similar copper squares who are piled up to form a perfect column against the corner. These sculptures look mathematically rigid, yet they are fragile since no units were ever glued or screwed together.
Carl Andre is an artist who is often disliked by the general public for being so radically blunt with his art. That is pretty understandable. In the last two works just mentioned, he is layering down possible mathematical extensions made of thin square in perfect contact with each other: horizontal and vertical. They are a few other possibilities (that he certainly exploited), but his work usually rapidly reach a cul de sac, and so he is forced to shift units. To circumscribe this problem, he also shifts materials as a mean to explore textures and reflection, therefore they are a few versions of the 144 squares floor listed above made with different metals. Now how much can you manage to enjoy x versions of a work that was already boring at first glance? Andre is obviously the least entertaining of the minimalists, but he's also probably the most true at heart with the original philosophy of the movement.
We may be missing a wood sculpture of Andre here, which would have added another layer: the transformation of organic material into fabricated order, and the tensions inherent in these oppositions.
Donald Judd:
Main interest: Identity Of The Object (how can two similar objects also be different?).
Donald Judd is a fantastic artist, perhaps the best of the minimalist. His works seems to scrutinize the materials and shapes of industrial design, synthesizing them into pure forms of art. They seem to emerge, or extend, from architecture, but with such character that soon recall of their autonomy.
The best way to comprehend the power of Judd's work, is to be able to see whole series of physically similar works, and be able to ponder at what differentiate them from one to another, as unique sculptures of art.
The problem with the selection here is that the three pieces, otherwise magnificent, are from very different series, so there is no way that one can "Judd"-ge (pardon the pun) the main focus that the artist conveyed throughout his career.
What is left is the slick look of industrial design, and shapes that almost seem practical, when it's all tricks for the art and meant to be not much more than pleasing to the eye.
Because with Judd comes a real pleasure in shaping things, and how objects (and their colors) cuts out from the space. It's a deliberate audacity at exploring the new materials and shape of the new technological world, and having fun at creating unecessary artefacts recycling the shapes and forms of an essentialist and neccessary approach to design. Judd is the ancestor of techno.
The "Untitled (1963)" wall piece is a pretty large example of a very known series of similar works, this time a copy all made of gavanized iron, with no use of color plexiglass. A sculpture that functions like a zigzag between plain and empty space, as well as rendering the full monolithic graciosity of pure architectural shapes, this sculptures moves even further with theory, in acknowledging that as a whole it is actually formed of a series of similar fragments. But are these fragments really exactly the same? No, they are never, because through the process of perception, you can never see two of them exactly from the same perspective. Dumbfounded yet ? But the best part is that it just look damn sexy.
The two other works "Untitled (1963-1975)" and "Untitled (1964)", also look like portions of architectures or furnitures, recycling the shapes and materials of industrial design into pure abstraction. The latter specifically take the shape of a metallic shelve, or some sort of futuristic post-deco heater, but with a closer look it resolves to be nothing but object-play, physical-play. a "painting of spatial experience" as he would probably prefer that I described. This is the type of works that called out for a future in artmaking, at a time when everybody was pronouncing the death of art, and we only started recently to grasp all the possibilities these artists announced.
The exhibits also presented one or two preparatory or post-facto drawings related
to the exhibit sculptures from each artists, such as a perspective study of Untitled
by Judd, another drawing of a neon work by Flavin, or this poem "Leverwords" by Carl André, which aligns series of 4-letter words as though they were objects deprived of meaning:
Leverwords
(8 February 1966)
beam
clay beam
edge clay beam
grid edge clay beam
bond grid edge clay beam
path bond grid edge clay beam
reef
slab reef
wall slab reef
bead wall slab reef
cell bead wall slab reef
rock cell bead wall slab reef
root
heel root
line heel root
rate line heel root
dike rate line heel root
sill dike rate line heel root
room
time room
hill time room
inch hill time room
rack inch hill time room
mass rack inch hill time room
carl Andre
8 february 1966
In another corner of the room were archives, including books, photos, and even personal letters. I felt stressed to read anything because at this point you are 1 meter away from the counter girl who watch you, probably wondering if you enjoy the show or not, as she must be used to be face so many different reactions.
Overall I consider this exhibition a necessary stop.
Minimalist art might be a dead trend, but not the relation between art and design that it launched.
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
"3 X 3: Flavin - Andre - Judd"
January 14 – February 19, 2005
Leonard And Bina Ellen Gallery
1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 12 pm - 6 pm
William Of Ockham
I'd love this blog to be minimal.
Yesterday I went to see the exhibit "3 X 3: Dan Flavin, Carl André, Donald Judd" at gallery Leonard And Bina Ellen at Concordia University (Montreal).
A selection of 3 works by 3 landmark minimalist artists, all works presented were from the permanent collection of the National Gallery Of Canada in Ottawa.
It was short, nostalgic, but I enjoyed it.
Slick, design-oriented, thoughtprovoking.
Thanks,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
......I can't really leave you this way, can I ?
Is there any such thing as bad minimalist art ?
Tough answer, maybe that is why they are still so many artists
doing it nowadays.
Yet to some, all minimalist art is bad: merely an invention of pedantic snobs laughing at the face of good-intentioned people.
There was a pretty heavy critic of the Bina Ellen show at the Voir journal by general onlookers, so much that I felt an urgency to reply over there, and explain why it is that minimal artists are so important (regardless of personal taste).
To be honest,I don't think that minimal art pieces by themselves are always that fascinating. I believe that what is truly fascinating in minimal art are artists' approaches on the subject, how they were able to focus on very specific points and respect them for a lifetime.
It is true that many of these specific issues are theoretical explorations that could hardly be repeated today (once something is said, it's said), unless in contexts of recyclage by the design industry, a field on which indeed minimalists probably had the greatest influence.
I'm thinking of this obsessive layering down of the basic "mathematics" of art, which was really the most evident here in the works of Dan Flavin and Carl Andre (to keep with the artists selected for this minimal survey).
As I mentioned elsewhere, and as you may all know, minimalists emerged at the convergence of two problematics:
1) Theoretically, aesthetic had been called obsolete (you like blue and I like
yellow, they are no critically pertinent common grounds on this aspect).
2) The industrial world was rapidly dephazing art on the level of material exploration and visual effect.
Therefore, deconstructing aesthetic in its most simple forms, and attempting to reach back the design world by erasing the human touch through the use of industrially fabricated material, became the main concerns of minimalists. Minimalists worked beyond representation, as they were aware that our world was already overwhelmed by it. Through their art they elaborated a thorough critic of the visual, turning back art unto itself, negociating its pertinence. Finding ways to create an art that would be logic, and essentially demonstrating visual parameters of perception, which we experience in everyday life.
In a sense, minimalist art was aiming at becoming "functionalist" art.A sort of strict, supra classical form of art that had an aesthetic purpose: expliciting the materialistic laws of art, not in the sense that it was all that theoretical, but more in the sense that it extended theory into an art that indulged into formulaic researches.
And the best way to experience these "formulations" is when you're able to see many works from one of these minimalists put together. "3 X 3" only permitted 3 works per artist, so I'm tempted to criticize the show from the educational standpoint of what could be learned about each artist from such a limitative context.
Let's see....
Dan Flavin:
Main Interest: Immateriality (How can one make a painting or sculpture out of pure light?).
One work was missing from the Montreal version of this travelling exhibit (Icon IV (the pure land) (to David John Flavin [1933-1962]), 1962-1969). It was required by the National Gallery of Washington for their recent Retrospective of this artist (which, by the way, will feature in my eventual top of the year 2004, something I expect to write somewhere in early march). What we were left with was the famous "Monument 4 For Those Who Have Been Killed In Ambush (To P.K. Who Reminded Me About Death),1966", a fine work but one that was already seen in Montreal during the "Global Village: The 60s" exhibition at Montreal's MFA in late 2003. It's one of those intermittent works of Flavin that attended to other preoccupations than plastic. It is not merely a canvase of light: you are invited to read into the cross format, something menacing that projects towards you. To me it looks like a canon or a hanging pole. The red obviously refers to violence and blood, and it would be ridicule to refute that reading, however literal it might be.
Some could argue that this work is not representative of standard Flavin interests, but it does serve him well as it proposes the audience how much can be said by the assemblage of a few neon lights. By itself, the work is reflective of Flavin's carreer.
The other work, titled "The Nominal Three (To William Of Ockham) (1963 )" couldn't be more representative of either Flavin's art or the aim of minimalist art in general. I have no intention to resume to you here the philosophy behind the "Ockham Razor" theory that it refers to, but let just say that the work itself is simply a demonstration of logical reasoning. It is the minimal format of a series. If you take one white neon, and install two more at a certain distance, it can still mean anything. You can read it in any direction. But if you add another chunk of three neons, at an extra distance, you get a serie, since from logic you can presume that the following set will include 4 neons, and then 5 neons, etc... The problem with minimalist art is that it deals so much with first-sight materiality that people tend to forget that these works sometimes hide such tricks behind their superficial outlook. What I just described sounds obvious to any real art amateur, but a great quantity of spectators don't expect art this demonstrative of its reason to be. Minimalism is a religious art that is fascinated by pure thought and the reductionism of all possibilities.
In all its godly white hermetism, this work just described reminded me that the major aspect lacking from Flavin's art in this exhibition was a work demonstratring his use of multicolored neon lights, and how he used to shape them as being the plastician of light that he was.
Carl André:
Main Interest: the expressive power of objects (what are the different configurations an object can take, between unit and its multiplication?).
carl André is the artist best represented by this exhibit. Not only his assemblage in series of a similar object, sometimes done by hand, is magnificently examplified by his work Lever (a series of 137 white bricks aligned on the floor in a precise row), but with the two copper works we are being demonstrated how André loved to reconfigure a same unit in all sorts of spatial possibilities (and sometimes shifting materials to explore even further visual possibilities). Here we are shown "144 Copper Square (1969)", a floor of 12 x 12 copper thin squares that visitors are invited to walk on, and in a room nearby, "Pile" (1977) , a serious amount of the similar copper squares who are piled up to form a perfect column against the corner. These sculptures look mathematically rigid, yet they are fragile since no units were ever glued or screwed together.
Carl Andre is an artist who is often disliked by the general public for being so radically blunt with his art. That is pretty understandable. In the last two works just mentioned, he is layering down possible mathematical extensions made of thin square in perfect contact with each other: horizontal and vertical. They are a few other possibilities (that he certainly exploited), but his work usually rapidly reach a cul de sac, and so he is forced to shift units. To circumscribe this problem, he also shifts materials as a mean to explore textures and reflection, therefore they are a few versions of the 144 squares floor listed above made with different metals. Now how much can you manage to enjoy x versions of a work that was already boring at first glance? Andre is obviously the least entertaining of the minimalists, but he's also probably the most true at heart with the original philosophy of the movement.
We may be missing a wood sculpture of Andre here, which would have added another layer: the transformation of organic material into fabricated order, and the tensions inherent in these oppositions.
Donald Judd:
Main interest: Identity Of The Object (how can two similar objects also be different?).
Donald Judd is a fantastic artist, perhaps the best of the minimalist. His works seems to scrutinize the materials and shapes of industrial design, synthesizing them into pure forms of art. They seem to emerge, or extend, from architecture, but with such character that soon recall of their autonomy.
The best way to comprehend the power of Judd's work, is to be able to see whole series of physically similar works, and be able to ponder at what differentiate them from one to another, as unique sculptures of art.
The problem with the selection here is that the three pieces, otherwise magnificent, are from very different series, so there is no way that one can "Judd"-ge (pardon the pun) the main focus that the artist conveyed throughout his career.
What is left is the slick look of industrial design, and shapes that almost seem practical, when it's all tricks for the art and meant to be not much more than pleasing to the eye.
Because with Judd comes a real pleasure in shaping things, and how objects (and their colors) cuts out from the space. It's a deliberate audacity at exploring the new materials and shape of the new technological world, and having fun at creating unecessary artefacts recycling the shapes and forms of an essentialist and neccessary approach to design. Judd is the ancestor of techno.
The "Untitled (1963)" wall piece is a pretty large example of a very known series of similar works, this time a copy all made of gavanized iron, with no use of color plexiglass. A sculpture that functions like a zigzag between plain and empty space, as well as rendering the full monolithic graciosity of pure architectural shapes, this sculptures moves even further with theory, in acknowledging that as a whole it is actually formed of a series of similar fragments. But are these fragments really exactly the same? No, they are never, because through the process of perception, you can never see two of them exactly from the same perspective. Dumbfounded yet ? But the best part is that it just look damn sexy.
The two other works "Untitled (1963-1975)" and "Untitled (1964)", also look like portions of architectures or furnitures, recycling the shapes and materials of industrial design into pure abstraction. The latter specifically take the shape of a metallic shelve, or some sort of futuristic post-deco heater, but with a closer look it resolves to be nothing but object-play, physical-play. a "painting of spatial experience" as he would probably prefer that I described. This is the type of works that called out for a future in artmaking, at a time when everybody was pronouncing the death of art, and we only started recently to grasp all the possibilities these artists announced.
The exhibits also presented one or two preparatory or post-facto drawings related
to the exhibit sculptures from each artists, such as a perspective study of Untitled
by Judd, another drawing of a neon work by Flavin, or this poem "Leverwords" by Carl André, which aligns series of 4-letter words as though they were objects deprived of meaning:
Leverwords
(8 February 1966)
beam
clay beam
edge clay beam
grid edge clay beam
bond grid edge clay beam
path bond grid edge clay beam
reef
slab reef
wall slab reef
bead wall slab reef
cell bead wall slab reef
rock cell bead wall slab reef
root
heel root
line heel root
rate line heel root
dike rate line heel root
sill dike rate line heel root
room
time room
hill time room
inch hill time room
rack inch hill time room
mass rack inch hill time room
carl Andre
8 february 1966
In another corner of the room were archives, including books, photos, and even personal letters. I felt stressed to read anything because at this point you are 1 meter away from the counter girl who watch you, probably wondering if you enjoy the show or not, as she must be used to be face so many different reactions.
Overall I consider this exhibition a necessary stop.
Minimalist art might be a dead trend, but not the relation between art and design that it launched.
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
"3 X 3: Flavin - Andre - Judd"
January 14 – February 19, 2005
Leonard And Bina Ellen Gallery
1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 12 pm - 6 pm
posted by Cedric at 6:41 AM
4 Comments:
I know...I know...
It.s full of mistakes.
I.m not english.
Maybe one day I'll pay someone to correct them all.
Cheers,
Cedric
Howdy!
Thanks Tons! What I always do in a situation where the gallery attendant is watching, is to engage them in conversation first, and then study the material. That way I feel that if I have any questions, I am comfortable enough to ask 'em, and in the same way that I can comfortably read a newspaper while my sister does something else, I don't feel as rude.
Except that you're social Chris,
and I'm anti-social ! ;-P
Are you aware that it's an ability you have to talk to strangers?
Well I'm workin on it,
Cedric
Great information on your site folks. I also am working on a czech bead site. I'll bookmark yours if you bookmark mine. You can find it at czech bead.
Again, nice site folks...I'll be baak...:)
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