During the 1960s and ’70s, as countercultural movements challenged the established frameworks of government and institutions and reevaluated race and gender relations, artists rejected the traditional categories of painting and sculpture and explored new ways to make art. This investigation resulted in the formation of a new aesthetic that sought to pare a work of art down to its essential core—be it a perfect cube, a basic, repetitive gesture, or a simple, declarative phrase. In many cases, the object of art disappeared altogether, leaving nothing more than a written account of an idea or a fleeting performance. The works included in Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present, drawn primarily from the Guggenheim Museum’s permanent collection, examine how a “minimalist” perspective has been essential to the development of postwar artistic practices.
Exhibition Overview
This sensibility can be seen in much of the avant-garde art of the 20th century as it moved towards formal clarity and abstraction. During the 1920s, Piet Mondrian omitted all extraneous details from his geometric paintings prompted by a utopian ideology that equated purity of form with spiritual transcendence. In Russia, at roughly the same time, the Constructivists abandoned any decorative flourish associated with bourgeois taste as a revolutionary rejection of class-based connoisseurship. At the heart of these movements was the desire to create a new, universal aesthetic language.
This reductivist impulse found renewed vigor during the 1950s in reaction to Abstract Expressionism, with its painterly extremes and references to individual subconscious states. Robert Rauschenberg’s historic multi-paneled, all-white painting from 1951 rejected the heroics of Abstract Expressionism and signaled a distinct change in approach to creating art. A stark, monochromatic canvas, it invites the audience’s participation by reflecting the shadows it casts in a room. This seminal work established two directions in the development of contemporary art: the elimination of all extraneous details to achieve an art of pure, essential form; and the attention to issues of perception and the viewer’s engagement with the work of art. This new work would foreshadow a decade of radical reduction that came to be known as Minimalism.
During the 1960s a number of American artists—namely Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris—independently began to create art that utilized industrial materials in arrangements of regular, modular units. This work excluded all surface ornamentation and all references outside the object itself. Primarily sculptural, Minimal art is based on the essential qualities of geometric forms. It shuns the handmade in favor of anonymous, industrial production and calls attention to itself as an object, without reference to symbolic meaning or value.
Minimalism’s impact on subsequent generations of contemporary artists is a major component of Singular Forms. The movement’s immediate successor, Post-Minimalism, explored process, the dematerialization of the object, the performative nature of art, and the structural properties of light. The viewer became an even more integral component of Post-Minimalist art, and the art object itself receded from its traditional, primary position, in some cases disappearing altogether, to be replaced by video or photographic documentation of an event or performance. Other works used mutable materials such as invisible gases or dirt, interventions in the landscape, or simply the passage of time as recorded by a shifting shadow.
During the past two decades, many artists have revived Minimalism as a style, infusing its unitary, nonreferential forms with content to focus on important social and cultural issues including racism, the AIDS epidemic, and environmental concerns. Singular Forms concludes with recent work that shares much of the look of classic Minimalist art, but uses it to communicate deeply personal, political, or poetic messages. The exhibition places Minimal art—with its adherence to an utmost precision of form—as an aesthetic phenomenon with roots in the past and ramifications for the generation of artists that followed.
–Adapted from exhibition catalogue introduction, by Nancy Spector, Curator of Contemporary Art
This resource unit is adapted from essays by J. Fiona Ragheb and Nancy Spector (Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z [New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2001]).
