Is the 8pt type a witty allusion to "small holes," or are you simply trying to ruin my eyes?

Just checking.

i really enjoyed this review. that said remember that minimalism never existed as a movement and that many such as flavin were quite upset about attempts to cast them into it by contmporary art writers of the time. so really to define a rigid set of rules as to what minimalism is, is as absurd as it is for the artist reviewed to pitch himself as an organic minimalist. flavin let outs a belchy laugh at both of you from his grave.

I always had trouble jumping the pegs until there was only one left. I never thought of it as art.

There's no satisfying you people.

snickers

I really like a lot of the stuff on Kirkland's website, but it raises a question about minimalism that I remember asking you in private, but which I can't remember the answer to.

Namely, that he's got several pieces that are very similar, yet named completely differently (lifecycle and revolve are good examples). To what extent are we supposed to take titles seriously in minimalist works? Does the artist really feel that these two pieces evoke markedly different reactions?

Many minimalist works seem to be left untitled, or named in an obscure manner. Flavin's a good counterexample, I guess, with his sometimes ridiculously overspecific, sometimes punny, but generally relevant titles.

I guess I'm suffering from what you'd probably call a serious flaw in viewing art -- namely that I place value on artistic intent. From that perspective, these two pieces seem like they may have been made without a deliberate plan, then arbitrarily given round-ish names. That's fine, but it effectively precludes the ponderous and tormented soul-searching that I'd like to think my (rhetorical) art dollar is paying for. If there isn't a deliberate plan behind a piece, then all of a sudden "my two year old could do that" becomes a legitimate criticism. If there was a deliberate plan behind both pieces and they ended up nearly identical, then how expressive/interesting is this visual vocabulary, really?

I am essentially a philistine, and unfamiliar with Kirkland (and of course I haven't seen the works in question), but why must Shadow follow Horseshoe "necessarily"? I can easily come up with a narrative about mimicry and abstraction by which the latter must follow the former necessarily, based on Horseshoe's pattern going against the grain of the wood and Shadows's following it.

Ben: I suppose I overshot with "must" and the italics on necessary. It's so clear to me, how could it be otherwise? is the critic's fallacy.

Anyway, the short answer is that I've seen Kirkland's work over time, though I think that the fact that Shadow is an outlier in the show might also lead a viewer toward that reading for a number of reasons. Moreover, I think reductive art (from Stella and co. all the way back to Malevich) tends to follow that kind of evolutionary pattern, from the manipulation of variables to form simple arrays toward more complex forms.

Tom: Weren't we at DC9 when we were discussing Minimalism? Probably why we can't recall what we talked about.

I'm trying to think of a way to unpack your question without being overly didactic about it. But I'm leaving now for the zombie movie, after which my brain may not be up to the task anyway.

By all means, bring on the didacticism. I'm obviously speaking from a position of ignorance here. Apologies to other commenters who might get bored by the interchange. But yeah, I'd like to learn the answer to this, and if I can remember it this time, so much the better.

they look like badly designed crib boards--is there anything left for minimalism ?

Let me see if I can just answer your specific ?s about M and see if we can get some others to chime in.

To what extent are we supposed to take titles seriously in minimalist works?

Same as any other titling convention, I suppose. For example, in the Die Fahne Hoch! piece by Stella, there's a tension between the emotional content of the Nazi anthem and the inaccessibility of the painting (whose shape is equivalent to a Nazi banner).

I guess I'm suffering from what you'd probably call a serious flaw in viewing art—namely that I place value on artistic intent.

OK, too things here: I think the idea that artistic intent is the mechanism by which art is endowed with meaning has been bruised so thoroughly that holding that opinion is one that, at the very least, requires a defensive posture. (For example, and I don't mean this snidely, the New Critics at The New Criterion are conscious of the fact that they practice a what you might call a minority art theory, New Criticism.) Barthes put up the definitive challenge to positivistic generative theory with his "Death of the Author"—which is to say, simply put, there's a reason that people talk about what art does rather than what artists mean.

This is not a prescriptive art theory posture but an historical artmaking fact: What with paint being representation and sculpture being objects artists eventually came to consider the nature of those relationships. God, I'm struggling to avoid the textbook didacticism, but we're roughly talking about the birth of Modernist thought.

I want to take that general history for granted and give you an example of how non-narrative art works qua art. Malevich's Black Square—he paints it as an identification of a form not found in nature. Then he transforms it across the plane and pivots it on an axis ("Cross" and "Circle" paintings, respectively). Then he moves these forms through other dimensions, completing the Suprematist cycle—which isn't exactly more interesting if you're asking what he's doing with colord blocks on the canvas, but is extremely compelling if you're wondering how an artist can represent form without sourcing nature. Sort of got off track by designing Suprematist clothing for the new Soviet citizen, but what can I say, those were heady times.

I'm not sure how or whether that addresses any of your questions, and it isn't strictly related to Minimalism (or Kirkland's work), but as I recall our previous discussion was about the merit of Malevich's work.