A defense of Minimalism from Anonymous

Chairs designed by Donald Judd

Yesterday I received an interesting comment from an anonymous reader in response to a piece I posted some months ago titled Why I am Not a Minimalist (June 2011). Because it addresses several key issues central to my objection to the Minimalist ethos, I thought I'd repost it here along with some comments of my own. Here is the comment, in full:

I'm a designer who works through a, for want of a better description, post-minimalist practice in that I am in constant debate of the idea of necessity. If anything other than the necessary is beaten into an object / image / graphic or space it will only be to the detriment of the core concept. To be conceptually honest you have to reject anything that might harm an idea.

Minimalism as a movement in the 60's was a wonderful full stop to abstract expressionism in a fairly hard edged way. Today's dreary vegan mum in an empty new york loft apartment is not what M Minimalism is about. It's just a process, a dedication to thought and a way of defending integrity. M Minimalism as portrayed on such blogs as minimalissimo.com is sometimes a vacuous embellishment of a passing fad, but much like anything else when you dig through the drudge there are beautiful ideas that shine through in the most simple way, be that use of material, process, colour or form. If it works, it works.

I would argue the images you have gathered above [see original post] are somewhat biased examples. and I offer these:

Jil sander's collections are fantastic and hugely popular globally as both high end fashion and on the high street via Uniqlo +J ranges.

Donald Judd's furniture described and outlined by him in his aptly named book "a chair is a good chair" and the interiors that ensued within his personal properties. Then there's the matter of his art, which polished the experience of colour and form to new levels.

And harking back to way before the 'movement' of the 60's Josef Albers' investigation of the interaction of colour where a sense of self must be wholly removed to fully appreciate what is happening.

I suppose really M Minimalism for me is the distillation of an idea and the dire need to defend creative integrity, rather than embellishing what could be perceived as half-cooked concepts and a culture of mediocrity.

So... This is my defense of M Minimalism, it can leave you feeling vacuous and shallow or maybe a little dirty and agitated or it could be a wholesome and contenting experience leaving only you humble pie."

Book review: Immersion Into Noise

A review I wrote of Joseph Nechvatal's new book, Immersion Into Noise, has been published in the UK-based journal Culture Machine (see link below). Since reading his Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) in 2009, I've been a huge fan of Nechvatal's work as both an artist and theoretician. Earlier this year he participated in my online symposium Beyond Kandinsky: Revisiting the Spiritual in Art, where his generous contributions helped point the way toward what may be considered a new sense of the spiritual for a post-Cartesian world. Both his books are now available for order online.

To read my review, please visit the journal's reviews page: Review: Immersion Into Noise.

To read more about the Beyond Kandinsky symposium, please visit the project website: Beyond Kandinsky.

FORTHCOMING ON THIS BLOG: An interview with Nechvatal in which the author will discuss his new book and the ideology of noise.

Exhibition review: Pawel Wojtasik at Priska Juschka

Pawel Wojtasik's Nine Gates at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
September 15 – October 29
547 W. 27th St., New York, NY 10001
www.priskajuschkafineart.com

Nine Gates, 2011, is a 15-minute, single-channel, HD video with sound inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, The Nine Gates of Your Body.

On entering the gallery, one comes first into an empty room, a sort of antechamber, in which there is nothing but the text of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, The Nine Gates of Your Body, inscribed on the walls. The poem, written by Apollinaire while he was serving in the First World War and addressed to his lover, Madeleine Pagès, contains nine stanzas, each extolling one of the nine “gates” – or orifices – of his lover’s body: right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, left nostril, right nostril, mouth, vagina, and anus. It is a hauntingly beautiful poem, made all the more so by what we know to be the setting of its creation – one in which death must have been a constant, palpable, and looming presence. The visual stillness of the antechamber, and the considerable time it takes to read all nine stanzas, together effect a subtle shift in the viewer’s consciousness; before entering the second room, one’s mind has been slowed, emptied of extraneous chatter, and reoriented into a contemplative mode in which sex and death – Eros and Thanatos – hover like specters.

One moves through a black curtain to enter the second room – a dark, cavernous space lit only by the illuminated rectangle of light that is the wall-sized screen. The giant illuminated images one is met with here are startling at first: a slowly opening eye and surrounding skin seen so closely, and with such exquisite detail, that one can see the tiny cilia protruding from each pore; a nostril or earlobe so microscopically observed, and projected at such grand scale, that one strains to identify them as the familiar forms they are. The succession of images mirrors that of the orifices evoked in Apollinaire’s poem, with shots so exquisitely crafted that each moment contains an aesthetic world in itself – one forever poised on the edge between representation and abstraction. As one becomes acclimated, the initial startle gives way to a state of multi-sensory arousal that vacillates between erotic excitement, sheer aesthetic thrill, and a mild but uncomfortable repulsion.

As one image leads to the next, the camera slowly sweeping over and probing each orifice, one becomes aware of the sound: a faint electronic hum or vibration that at moments evokes the coursing murmur of fluid moving through a body. Enveloped in the darkness of the room and caressed by the waves of visual movement produced by the rhythm of the shots and cuts, one becomes vaguely aware of the sound as amniotic fluid, of the room as womb.

In one particularly mysterious shot before the final sequence, what appear to be wrinkly, bulbous masses of brown and purple flesh fill the screen. As we zoom in on one such mass, short, coarse hairs strongly suggestive of surgical sutures become the eye’s focal points. While the moist flesh glistens with succulence and life, a sense of danger and foreboding – even of violence – is conjured by the wiry, stitch-like hairs.

In the final sequence, the screen begins to darken on the right; a small, encroaching corner of darkness begins to grow toward the shaft of a penis as it softly lifts folds of labia and rises up into the penultimate orifice. Here the sense of unfamiliarity granted by the extreme resolution and scale of the images reaches its pinnacle, as that which is so intimately familiar to us somatically is beheld visually, as if for the first time. The pace remains slow and rhythmic until the end, and by the end the entire right half of the screen is dark.

Leaving the womb/cave, one re-emerges into the antechamber, and into the light, altered. The experience of Wojtasik’s piece is one of a significant inner shift instigated by sensorial excess, the conflation of a multitude of conflicting impulses, ideas, and desires, and, above all else, a deep sense of interior transcendence. The transcendent nature of sexual passion is clear to everyone who has experienced it. But Wojtasik’s piece is not mere pornography; it is fundamentally a meditation on erotic love and its inextricable link with its dialectical opposite: death. Death, being the ultimate transcendence – the final “moving beyond”– is the inescapable backdrop against which we live and love and have our being, the haunting negation without which life, love, and being would be meaningless.

But perhaps there is more than this dialectical tension to the relationship between love and death. Perhaps, as Georges Bataille has suggested, what we seek in eroticism is something we have lost but which we longingly and perpetually yearn to recover – namely, a feeling of “profound continuity.” Since there is no profounder continuity than that of death, erotic love and death represent not polar opposites but contiguous – and at times indistinguishable – bands along the same continuum. The return to nothingness, then, becomes not just the negation of life but also the ultimate return to this lost continuity, and one that we continually pre-enact throughout our lives through erotic passion. In his introduction to Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Bataille states:

We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is.*

Indeed, the sense of transcendence one experiences while immersed in Nine Gates is nothing if not a feeling of being, however fleetingly, intimately linked with something larger than our “discontinuous, isolated” selves, of merging with something that far exceeds our imaginary lover’s body.

* Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, translated by Mary Dalwood (San Franciso: City Lights Books, 2001), p.15.


- T.R.

New book by Joseph Nechvatal

Joseph Nechvatal, a digital artist and theoretician who participated in my Beyond Kandinsky symposium earlier this year, has just released a new book. Titled Immersion Into Noise, Nechvatal's new book explores noise -- not just auditory, but visual, spatial, and networked as well -- as the material for a new kind of immersive art that presents a radical challenge to conventional notions of aesthetic experience. Having been greatly inspired by his earlier book, Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (2009), I've been looking forward to this one for a while.

In advance of the forthcoming print and downloadable e-book versions to be published by Open Humanities Press, Immersion Into Noise is currently available in HTML by way of the following link:

Immersion Into Noise

I'm sure I'll have much more to say on the book later (I've just started reading it myself), but in the meantime, here's a review written by Yuting Zou that appeared in the Brooklyn Rail earlier this year:

Nechvatal's Immersive Noise Theory

To read the introductory statement Nechvatal wrote for the symposium Beyond Kandinsky: Revisiting the Spiritual in Art, click here.

More on Seeing

In response to my last post on Brakhage and vision, a friend wrote and asked if I'd read Merleau-Ponty's classic essay titled "Eye and Mind." I hadn't read the piece in years, although I vaguely recalled that it appears in his book The Primacy of Perception, which I own (somewhere). The reminder sent me searching through the wayward stacks of books, papers, and magazines that, alas, constitute my library, and although my efforts failed to produce Merleau-Ponty I was happily rewarded by another discovery. At the bottom of one of the stacks (neatly, if somewhat ambiguously, labeled "Next") was an unopened copy of the Fall 2011 issue of the journal Parabola, whose theme happens to be Seeing.

Fortunately, Merleau-Ponty's piece is available online. I'm so grateful to have been reminded of it, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it recently. Here's a link: "Eye and Mind."

Before getting to "Eye and Mind," however, I spent a few hours enjoying the articles on seeing in Parabola. One of them in particular caught my sustained attention. It's a piece titled "Looking with Your Whole Body: A Conversation with Jane Rosen." In it the artist Jane Rosen discusses what seeing means to her and the central role it plays in her practice. Here's a brief excerpt of her conversation with interviewer Richard Whittaker:

Whittaker: I agree, we don't see very much, but what is it when someone stops and keeps looking and then starts to see more, literally?

Rosen: That means they kept looking. And that shifts what I would call cognitive gears -- so there comes a new moment. The first look is a word, a name. To me anything that is attached to words and names is mental looking. Then, I think there is a looking with your whole body as if there were tentacles that sense and touch the totality of the thing you're looking at so that the tree stops being leaves, branches, roots. It starts becoming a clustering, a gathering, a drooping, a lifting, a turning.

(Excerpt from p. 39, Fall 2011 Parabola)

What strikes me as so insightful about this statement is the idea that it's not language per se that occludes vision; it's a particular subset of it -- namely, nouns. Perhaps it's really our tendency to think in terms of "things" rather than processes, of objects rather than actions, that is the greatest obstacle to seeing accurately. This makes me wonder what we might be able to accomplish by "verbing" all our nouns, so that instead of the bird, leaves, and sky I see out my window there would be simply birding, leafing, skying, and windowing. It's still language, of course (or languaging), but it might just move us one step closer to seeing -- and ultimately, to truthing. I think I'll try it this week: One full day of gerunding.

Metaphors on Vision, by Stan Brakhage

I once heard it said that artists are the great noticers of society -- that more than anything else, we simply notice things that other people don't. I say "simply," but of course there's nothing simple about it. Learning to see -- to really see, to see through cognitive and societal conventions and, above all else, the tangled skein of language -- takes years of disciplined practice.

Why is it so difficult to see? This is the question I pose to my students on the first class of every year. This year, I've found a little gem of an essay written by the great Stan Brakhage to accompany our discussion. I wanted to post a link to it here, but since it's not available online and it's quite short, I'm going to write it out. Here it is (below), in full. (From Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage, edited with a foreword by Bruce R. McPherson, Documentext, 2001.)

Metaphors on Vision

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "Green"? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the "beginning was the word."

To see is to retain -- to behold. Elimination of all fear is in sight -- which must be aimed for. Once vision may have been given -- that which seems inherent in the infant's eye, an eye which reflects the loss of innocence more eloquently than any other human feature, an eye which soon learns to classify sights, an eye which mirrors the movement of the individual toward death by its increasing inability to see.

But one can never go back, not even in imagination. After the loss of innocence, only the ultimate of knowledge can balance the wobbling pivot. Yet I suggest that there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind, and dependent upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word.

Suppose the Vision of the saint and the artist to be an increased ability to see -- vision. Allow so-called hallucinations to enter the realm of perception, allowing that mankind always finds derogatory terminology for that which doesn't appear to be readily usable, accept dream visions, day-dreams or night-dreams, as you would so-called real scenes, even allowing that the abstractions which move so dynamically when closed eyelids are pressed are actually perceived. Become aware of the fact that you are not only influenced by the visual phenomena which you are focused upon and attempt to sound the depths of all visual influence. There is no need for the mind's eye to be deadened after infancy, yet in these times the development of visual understanding is almost universally forsaken.

This is an age which has no symbol for death other than the skull and bones of one stage of decomposition...and it is an age which lives in fear of total annihilation. It is a time haunted by sexual sterility yet almost universally incapable of perceiving the phallic nature of every destructive manifestation of itself. It is an age which artificially seeks to project itself materialistically into abstract space and to fulfill itself mechanically because it has blinded itself to almost all external reality within eyesight and to the organic awareness of even the physical movement properties of its own perceptibility. The earliest cave paintings discovered demonstrate that primitive man had a greater understanding than we do that the object of fear must be objectified. The entire history of erotic magic is one of possession of fear thru holding it. The ultimate searching visualization has been directed toward God out of the deepest possible human understanding that there can be no ultimate love where there is fear. Yet in this contemporary time how many of us even struggle to deeply perceive our own children?

The artist has carried the tradition of visual and visualization down through the ages. In the present time a very few have continued the process of visual perception in its deepest sense and transformed their inspirations into cinematic experiences. They create a new language made possible by the moving picture image. They create where fear before them has created the greatest necessity. They are essentially preoccupied by and deal imagistically with -- birth, sex, death, and the search for God.

Relationships, Architecture, and Reenchantment

In Charlene Spretnak’s engaging and very timely new book, Relational Reality, there is a chapter devoted to what Spretnak is calling the relational shift within the field of architecture and community design that I’ve found particularly relevant to artists, as well as deeply inspiring. By “relational shift” Spretnak means the shift in worldview we are now experiencing away from the mechanistic model inaugurated by the Enlightenment and toward a more ecological, dynamic, and relational model. No longer the billiard ball or clockwork universe envisioned by the likes of Newton and Descartes, the emerging model posits a universe that is alive, enchanted, and fundamentally relational – one whose entities are, in Spretnak’s words, “thoroughly relational beings of great complexity, who are both composed of and nested within contextual networks of dynamic and reciprocal relationships.” We, like everything else in this universe, literally are relationships. (I don’t know about you, but I find this vastly preferable to being a billiard ball or a gear in some Sky God’s wristwatch.)

In her chapter that focuses on architecture, Spretnak cites an essay that was written several years ago by an architecture professor named Rachel McCann. The essay, titled “On the Hither Side of Depth,” is both an indictment of her profession for its fundamental disengagement with the world and a powerful statement about how meaning is generated in experience by means of the body, by means of bodily engagement with the world. I was able to find the essay online thanks to the generosity of the journal Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, which published the piece in 2005. Below is a link to the issue containing the essay, which appears on page 8.

Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology (Rachel McCann essay)

Although McCann’s subject is architecture, everything she says could be equally applied to art (in fact she does discuss painting quite a bit), and I’ve found her thoughts to be wonderfully resonant with some of the things I’ve been thinking about this summer. Ever since finishing Morris Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World back in June, I’ve been preoccupied with the question of how the split between fact and value, which Berman singles out as the defining characteristic of modernity, has manifested itself in art. In what ways has art become materialistic, in the sense of being about “visual facts” divorced from meaning, value, and what we might call responsible ways of being-in-the-world, and in what ways might it recover those old alliances? In an earlier post I focused on Minimalism as an example of this split (in fact, it’s possibly the paragon), but I’m convinced there are myriad other ways in which we’ve all been – and continue to be – perpetuating the mechanistic worldview in our work. McCann’s essay on architectural pedagogy reminded me of the role that language and the hegemony of vision (to the exclusion of the other senses) have played in continuing the legacy of Enlightenment values, and of the crucial role of the body in any post-Cartesian paradigm. I’m hoping others will read the essay (as well as Spretnak’s book).