The Literal Line: Minimalism Then and Now

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wo of the most significant ideas that resulted from Minimalism were first, that the concept behind the artwork was as important as the physical object or manifestation of that concept—that the real “artistry” was based on the artist’s idea, not in the hands-on execution of the piece; and second, that the placement or siting of the artwork is an essential artistic consideration, whether the object hangs on the wall of a gallery or rests on the floor, occupies a public space or is out on the land. By the mid-1960s the question no longer was, What is an object? but How do we know or experience the object? The artist’s intention about how a work is seen and the space it is seen in became a critical part of its story.

Artists like Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) and Fred Sandback (1943–2003) embraced both these considerations and made works that could be reproduced multiple times in different spaces, each iteration slightly different from the others. For these artists the “artwork” was essentially a sheet of instructions that anyone could execute. Consequently, the work changed with the architectural parameters of each space—the size of the wall, the height of the ceiling, the texture of the walls, floors or ceiling and the source of light in the room would all greatly affect the outcome of the written instructions.

LeWitt’s systematic approach to making art was based on a set of fixed dimensions and designs. He regarded the idea of a work as a machine for generating form—a way of freeing the artist from making arbitrary or creative decisions. Rejecting the longheld perception of the artist as unique creator was at the core of LeWitt’s practice. Not only could anyone execute his instructions, he designed them in such a way that they were open ended, allowing each person to interpret them in his or her own way. His wall drawings are an extension of his sculptural works, all of which are variations on a grid.

And while LeWitt’s pieces were impersonal and systematic in their structure, their reality was varied and rich as they were adapted to different spaces.

Like LeWitt, Fred Sandback made work that began with a set of instructions. His

simple drawings outline mathematical formulas for determining angles and dimensions. Sandback studied sculpture with Donald Judd and Robert Morris at the Yale University School of Art, where he became interested in the Minimalists’ questions about what constituted a work of art. His struggle with those questions evolved into a desire to create sculpture that was volumeless but still had presence. Sandback asked that his work be seen and understood completely in context—in specific situations and in relationship to everything around it.

His forms are defined by lines of yarn strung taut in space. The lines are canted at prescribed angles in such a manner that they appear to define volume and form. The act of perception—the viewer’s intuitive ability Sol LeWitt, Untitled, 2001, gouache on paper, © 2011 The LeWitt to fill in the form—is the crux of the Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, private collection work. The viewer focuses less on the tangible aspect of the work (the yarn lines) than on the volume and plane suggested by those lines. Sandback’s work is not about Minimalist adherence to material but rather an acknowledgment of the incorporeal. He urges us to recognize the link between the literal and the implied.

Visual Arts / The Center, Ketchum

Lectures

Opening Ce leb rat ion and Gallery Walks

How Muc h Less is More?

Fri, Aug 5 & Fri, Sep 2, 5–8pm Free at The Center, Ketchum Enjoy a glass of wine or a cocktail as you view the exhibition

Free E xhib ition Tours

Tue, Aug 16, 2pm and by arrangement The Center, Ketchum Trained gallery guides offer insights into the artwork on display in free tours of our exhibitions. Favor de llamar al Centro de las Artes para arreglar visitas guiadas en español.

E vening Exhi bit ion Tour

Thu, Sep 8, 5:30pm The Center, Ketchum Enjoy a glass of wine as you tour The Literal Line with The Center’s curators and gallery guides.

This project has been generously supported by The Robert Lehman Foundation and The Wolfson Family Foundations.

Continued on interior panels…

www.sunvalleycenter.org 208.726.9491 Mon–Fri, 9–5, Sats in Aug, 11–5 191 Fifth Street East, Ketchum Exhibitions in The Center’s ­galleries are always free and open to the public.

Brice Marden, After Botticelli 1-5, 1992-93, set of five etchings and aquatints on Twinrocker handmade paper, © 2011 Brice Marden Artists’ Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Collection of Katherine and Joseph Hardiman

Carl Andre, Al Paragrate, 2002, 44 aluminum ingots, promised gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum

The Sun Valley Center for the Arts joins forces with the Sun Valley Summer Symphony and The Community Library in a first-time collaboration to explore Minimalism in the visual arts, music, literature and architecture. Each organization is offering programs that relate to Minimalism as it manifested in each of their particular artistic arenas. The Sun Valley Summer Symphony will explore Minimalism as a compositional foundation in works by John Adams, The Chairman Dances (August 4), and Nico Muhly, Wish You Were Here (August 7). The Community Library will address the idea of Minimalism in architecture with a lecture by Aaron Betsky titled The Importance of Nothing: Space and Minimalism in Modernism September 1.

The Literal Line: Minimalism Then and Now

August 5 – September 30, 2011

A Look at Minimalis m in t he Mains t rea m

By Ro ber t St orr

Tue, Aug 9, 6pm, The Community Library, Ketchum In partnership with The Community Library and the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, The Center presents Robert Storr—artist, critic and former curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Storr has been a contributing editor at Art in America since 1981 and writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris) and Frieze (London). He is currently Consulting Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Professor of Painting and Printmaking and Dean of the Yale School of Art. Storr will address how the principles and practices of Minimalism as an art movement have trickled down and manifested in contemporary popular culture.

The Li tera l Line: Minimalis m Then and Now

By K ris tin P oole and Cour t ney Gilber t

Thu, Sep 15, 5:30pm, The Center, Ketchum Kristin Poole and Courtney Gilbert will walk viewers through the historic impulses behind minimalism, discuss the movement’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, and talk about its ­resonances in the work of 21st-century artists.

C a r l A n dr e Ru t h L a s k e y S ol L e W i tt Br ic e M a r de n Agn e s M a r t i n W e s M i ll s F r e d S a n db ac k R ic h a r d T u ttl e

The Literal Line: Minimalism Then and Now This exceptional group of paintings, works on paper and sculptural ­objects by artists working at the forefront of the Minimalist movement in the 1960s and 1970s alongside work by contemporary artists provides an intimate look at a movement that continues to influence artists into the 21st century. The exhibition explores the tendency to create work that is literally about surface and line— about materials and their properties rather than expression or illusion.

These artists continued Modernism’s inclination to reduce art down to its most basic elements. That tendency continues today in different formats and with new and varied intentions.

C a r l A n dr e Ru t h L a s k e y S ol L e W i tt Br ic e M a r de n Agn e s M a r t i n W e s M i ll s F r e d S a n db ac k R ic h a r d T u ttl e

Continued from exterior panels…

This strategy of asking the viewer to actively participate in the act of ­looking is a byproduct of Minimalism. Hard core Minimalists Donald Judd and Richard Morris made works that they hoped viewers would take in as a whole, swiftly and efficiently. Their colleague Carl Andre (b. 1935) shared this desire to create an easily understood, quickly apprehended art. Like Judd and sculptor Dan Flavin, Andre chose early in his career to work with basic, commercially available, usually unmodified units in order to construct his sculptures: wooden 2 x 4s, 9 ft. Styrofoam beams, sand lime bricks and pre-cut squares of elemental metals like zinc, aluminum and copper. Like LeWitt, Andre has often used the grid as the underlying structure of his sculptures, whether stacks of bricks or checkerboard patterns of metal on the floor.

The space in which his art is located is always important to Andre, who sometimes draws attention to the surrounding architecture by, for example, locating a floor sculpture in the corner of a room so that it seems to emerge from the very walls of the gallery. The concept of labor infuses everything Andre makes—the labor that went into fabricating the units with which he works as well as the artistic labor involved in arranging these units into a sculptural whole. Andre, who relies on mathematical formulas to determine his sculptures’ final forms, refuses to assign meaning to them beyond their material existence.

For other artists the modernist push to reduction did not necessitate that works be so quickly comprehended. Agnes Martin (1912–2004), for example, pursued the opposite strategy—to make simple objects, paintings or drawings that ask a viewer to look carefully; to consider and then reconsider what he or she is seeing. To take the time to let the work unfold and reveal itself.

Martin’s spare, meditative works influenced an entire generation of contemporary painters including Richard Tuttle and Wes Mills, both of whom had long-standing friendships with Martin. Martin is frequently cited as a Minimalist but she rejected that association, finding Minimalism aloof and impersonal. Meditation and the act of looking were critical to Martin, and she achieved in her quiet, ambient works a luminosity that dissolved the materials and suggested metaphysical interpretations. The subtlety of Martin’s marks requires stepping forward and stepping back to fully understand the work. Here the “act” of action painting is slowed and is linked more with a single thought, with a meditative act rather than a grand gesture.

Unlike many modern and contemporary artists, Martin never abandoned the conventions of painting. She made a conscious commitment to painting in a traditional rectangular format on standard-size canvases. The bands of color and light that constitute her mature approach were determined by a series of mathematical divisions. So while her Wes Mills, Haft Rang, 1997-98, pen and graphite marks are wholly her graphite on paper, Courtesy the artist

Ruth Laskey, Twill Series (Teal Blue/New Emerald Green/Marigold), 2007, hand-dyed and hand-woven linen, Courtesy the artist and Ratio3, San Francisco, Collection of Claudia and Adam Goldyne

own, the paintings begin with a formula based on the grid as the foundation. It is within that rigid system that Martin was able to express herself. Her paintings and drawings are made up of hazy pen and pencil marks made that vary in strength and weight. Martin was very conscious of using closely toned hues, which increased the sense of suffused light.

Richard Tuttle’s (b. 1941) art bridges the gap between painting and sculpture. His small, subtle, fabricated pieces made of wood, paper or fabric are pinned or stacked in the gallery space at odd and unfamiliar heights. Tuttle’s prolific output is a direct result of his approach to art-making, which is more an idea-based “practice” than a search for the perfect, unique object.

Since he began his career in the 1960s, Tuttle has made three-dimensional objects, but he commonly refers to his work as drawing. The small scale and handmade nature of his works confound the conventions of 1960s Minimalist sculpture, which was generally defined by monumental scale and “macho” industrial materials. Tuttle’s playful objects are usually crafted from common household materials such as paper, string, cloth, plywood, cardboard and Styrofoam. Their simple shapes and colors have evolved from Minimalism, but their familiarity is comforting rather than off-putting. As is true of Martin’s paintings, in their simplicity they ask us to look and then look again.

The idea of art as a practice, a meditation, is an apt description for the approach taken by Wes Mills (b.

1960), who draws nearly every day. The authenticity of Mills’s deliberate mark making is compelling. The graphite lines or smudges, carefully laid on a prepared ground, are seductive in their delicacy and intimacy. While the marks are deliberate, they are not predetermined. It is as if Mills is making visible the trace of his experience of and in the world.

His works speak to time and poetry, almost functioning as short haikus. The drawings are devoid of all outside references—what exists is the line and the ground that it sits on. We observe; we stop and, in so doing, go inward.

Painter Brice Marden (b.

1938) began his career with a formal Minimalist approach to the rectangle Agnes Martin, Untitled, 2002, graphite and acrylic on linen, that was influenced by Josef Albers, his © 2011 Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, teacher at Yale. For a number of years his private collection paintings were controlled blocks of subdued monochromatic color. Influenced by the Minimalists, Marden’s paintings were spare in color and form. But he departed from his predecessors’ aesthetic in his rejection of the factory-finished surface. Instead Marden’s pieces were carefully crafted to celebrate the tactility of their surfaces. He built up layers of beeswax and pigment and applied paint with spatulas to achieve a dense and resonant “skin” on his ­paintings.

In 1983 Marden took a life-changing trip to Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, where an exhibition on calligraphic art compelled him to begin experimenting with new techniques of mark making, such as drawing with twigs and sticks dipped in ink. The tension between freedom and containment that is the hallmark of calligraphy became a driving impulse in his work. The tangled lines and looping marks that are the central forms in much of his recent work have gained him an international reputation as a unique abstract artist who Fred Sandback, Untitled, from Four Variations of Two Diagonal Lines, has joined Minimalist spare1976, etching with aquatint on Rives BFK paper, ed. 20/35, Courtesy the ness with a romantic sensibility.

Estate of Fred Sandback and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

There is mystery and metaphor in the hand wrought nature of Marden’s surfaces. Critic Robert Hughes succinctly summarizes Marden’s approach in stating “this was Minimalism humanized…” (American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, 1998).

Ruth Laskey (b. 1975) combines the simple forms of Tuttle’s “drawings” with the subtle coloration and gestures of Agnes Martin’s canvases. Instead of carefully rendered graphite or pen lines, Laskey’s works are composed of thread that Laskey has painted with hand-mixed dyes and then woven into bleached linen. The resulting pieces are not quick Modernist gestures or simple Conceptual forms plunked down in a room, but works that infer labor and time, suggesting contemplative energies in the manner of Martin and Mills. Weaving simple geometric forms, she asks that we consider the relationships between color and shape. As with Tuttle, the immediacy of the form and shape disappears as we give them more time. In Laskey’s pieces the Minimalist grid that LeWitt and Martin rely on for structure becomes, literally, the support for the forms woven into the right angles of the linen.

Each of these artists’ work reflects a personal and intense commitment to making art that requires thought. As simple as that may seem, it is not the same as making art for the sake of beauty or with a desire to accurately and acutely represent a thing seen.

These artists are making art about the act and process of looking and in so doing ask us to consider how we see and what we see. How do our perceptions and presuppositions fill in the blanks? What does it mean to be able to see the artist’s touch or mark? What does an artist’s choice of materials say about the artwork itself? In asking us to think about and actually experience these works, they offer us a gift, a moment of heightened awareness of our perceptions and how they serve and inform us.

—Kristin Poole, Co-Executive Director and Artistic Director

Richard Tuttle, #1 from Galisteo Paintings, 1993, one of seven woodcuts with hand-painted borders in a portfolio designed by the artist, ed. 30, published by Crown Point Press, private collection