April 5, 2004
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Ideas and Art
— Motto of
Plato’s Academy
From Minimalist Fantasies,
by Roger Kimball, May 2003:
All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. … What you see is what you see.
—Frank Stella, 1966
Minimal Art remains too much a feat of ideation, and not enough anything else. Its idea remains an idea, something deduced instead of felt and discovered.
— Clement Greenberg, 1967
The artists even questioned whether art needed to be a tangible object. Minimalism … Conceptualism — suddenly art could be nothing more than an idea, a thought on a piece of paper….
— Michael Kimmelman, 2003
There was a period, a decade or two ago, when you could hardly open an art journal without encountering the quotation from Frank Stella I used as an epigraph. The bit about “what you see is what you see” was reproduced ad nauseam. It was thought by some to be very deep. In fact, Stella’s remarks—from a joint interview with him and Donald Judd—serve chiefly to underscore the artistic emptiness of the whole project of minimalism. No one can argue with the proposition that “what you see is what you see,” but there’s a lot to argue with in what he calls “the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.” We do not, of course, see ideas. Stella’s assertion to the contrary might be an instance of verbal carelessness, but it is not merely verbal carelessness. At the center of minimalism, as Clement Greenberg noted, is the triumph of ideation over feeling and perception, over aesthetics.
— Roger Kimball, 2003
From How Not Much Is a Whole World,
by Michael Kimmelman, April 2, 2004
Decades on, it’s curious how much Minimalism, the last great high modern movement, still troubles people who just can’t see why … a plain white canvas with a line painted across it
“William Clark,”
by Patricia Johanson, 1967
should be considered art. That line might as well be in the sand: on this side is art, it implies. Go ahead. Cross it.
….
The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated, either. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism’s bottom line.
If what results can sometimes be more fodder for the brain than exciting to look at, it can also have a serene and exalted eloquence….
That line in the sand doesn’t separate good art from bad, or art from nonart, but a wide world from an even wider one.
I maintain that of course
we can see ideas.
Example: the idea of
invariant structure.
“What modern painters
are trying to do,
if they only knew it,
is paint invariants.”
– James J. Gibson, Leonardo,
Vol. 11, pp. 227-235.
Pergamon Press Ltd., 1978
For a discussion
of how this works, see
Block Designs,
4×4 Geometry, and
Diamond Theory.
Incidentally, structures like the one shown above are invariant under an important subgroup of the affine group AGL(4,2)… That is to say, they are not lost in translation. (See previous entry.)
