Brilliant | Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties

Essential and Readable | Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties | James Meyer

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	• Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties James Meyer Yale University Press, 2001 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Chapters trace the movement & examine its major qualities

This history of minimalist theory and thought is based on the contention that the question of what constitutes minimalism has remained unresolved since the 1960s. Chapters trace the movement, examine its major qualities, and considers the presence of minimalism as a debate or argument developed in response to works of others.

Brilliant

A stunning and brilliant book, this is THE essential work on minimalism.

Essential and Readable

This book is already becoming the standard work on the etiology of the movement. Meyer combines a complete mastery of the period's theoretical issues with a sleuth's approach to its historical narrative. Essential.

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What is minimalism? The answer to this simple question has defied simple answers. In this highly readable history of minimalist art James Meyer argues that 'minimalism' was not a coherent movement but a field of overlapping and sometimes opposed practices. He traces in comprehensive detail the emergence of six figures associated with the development - Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Anne Truitt - and how the notion of minimalism came to be constructed around their art in the 1960s. Despite distinctive differences in method and points of view, Meyer shows how these artists became equated in a series of important exhibitions and texts that led to their designation as minimalists. Beginning with the first reviews of minimalist shows, the book tracks the development of an art that critics dubbed Cool Art, ABC Art, and Primary Structures before settling on the deprecating label 'minimal art'. Suggesting that such work was overly reduced in form and facture, this term implied that the new abstraction was barely legible as fine art to some viewers. Meyer describes the heated polemic that unfolded in response to these practices, the differing claims of the artists and the sometimes intense rivalries that developed within a highly competitive, fashion-minded New York art scene. The book culminates with an analysis of minimalism's canonisation in the late sixties, its reception in Europe and its discrediting by leftist viewers who associated the new art with American capitalist-imperialism of the Vietnam War.

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