The Crux of Minimalism

Hal Foster, in his chapter “The Crux of Minimalism” in The Return of the Real, positions Minimalism as both the crowning apogee of Modernism and also the break from it. According to Foster, Minimalism completes Modernism only to exceed it. He writes:

“We arrive, then, at this equation: minimalism breaks with late modernism through a partial reprise of the historical avant-garde, specifically its disruption of the formal categories of institutional art. To understand minimalism – that is, to understand its significance for advanced art since its time – both parts of this equation must be grasped at once.” (Foster, Return of the Real, p54)

Foster recognizes some of the complexities and contradictions in Minimalism (particularly the extent to which Minimalism claims both phenomenological and epistemological traits). He also warns of anachronistic interpretations. Nonetheless, he draws on a series of binary oppositions to show how Minimamalism is a break from the Modernist ideals championed by Clement Greenberg.

I found myself analyzing Foster's text in terms of these binary oppositions. I wrote down all the pairings I could find. Looking at the list, I thought others might find it useful:

Greenbergian Modernism	Minimalism
“Expansive” and “vanguard” (Greenberg)	“Reductive” and “retardaire” (Greenberg)
Participated in cultural regressions of Reagan-Bush era	Opened up a new field of art
Apparent freedoms	Apparent restrictions
Transcendental space of modernism	Immanence of Dada readymade or constructivist relief
Anthropomorphic images and gestures	Presence of objects
Siteless realm, standing apart on a pedestal or as pure art	Repositioned among objects and redefined in terms of place
Safe, sovereign space of formal art	The here and now
Surface	Site
Topographical mapping of the properties of a medium	Perceptual consequences of a particular intervention
Essential qualities of art	“Extraneous effects” (Greenberg)
An ideological model of meaning and of consciousness	Called “reductive” and “idealist” but complicates the purity of conception with the contingency of perception
Formal essence and categorical being	Perceptual conditions and conventional limits of art
Private meaning and subject	Public meaning and subject
Mental space of idealism conception	Physical interface with actual world
Strictly spatial, entirely present, grasped in a single glance, a transcendental moment of grace	Concern with time and reception, and the temporality of perception.
Illusionist	Literal readings
Objects set in relation to one another	Nonhierarchical ordering of objects to “take relationships out of the work and make them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision” (Morris)
Structural linguistics	Phenomenology (but with a structural underpinning)
I express	I perceive
Categorical imperatives, historicist tendencies	“linear history has unraveled somewhat” (Judd)
Objective painting	Not painting, but a creation of objects
Quality – judged by reference to the canon of Old Masters and great Moderns	Interest - provoked by testing aesthetic categories and transgressing set forms
Normative criticism and aesthetic refinement	Epistemelogical disruption, aesthetic play
Artist as existential creator and formal critic, with access to transcendental sublime	Death or the author, birth of the viewer
Aims to defeat or suspend objecthood	Aims to discover objecthood as such
Discover the essence	Transgress the limits (there is no way you can frame it)
Formal autonomy	You just have to experience it
Sublime “instantaneousness” “which at every moment is wholly manifest”, individual “grace” (Fried)	“theatrical”, “as it happens it merely is” , “the negation of art”, only literalism (Fried)
An act of faith and devotion that compess conviction (Fried)	Avant-gardist atheism (Fried)
Autonomy, belief, conviction, a secret substitute for religion (Fried)	Saps, disrupts, corrupts autonomy, belief, conviction (Fried)
Self critical objectivity	Specific objects
Modernist autonomy based in formalism and disciplines	Literalism, gestalt, perception, situation
Old	New
Purify art of life	Sublate art into life
Preserve	Transform
Posits aesthetic norms and normative examination	Posits functional analysis: investigation of the social and institutional
Normative	Experimental
Refinement	Redefinition
Secure a transcendental conviction in art	Undertake immanent testing of discursive rules and institutional regulations
Seek the essential	Reveal the conditional
Compel conviction	Cast doubt