Peter Schjeldahl: Bare Minimal

By contrast, MOCA's “A Minimal Future?” insists on the movement’s jagged break with all past art. The show begins—and climaxes—with a tremendous installation in a vast white room: “black paintings” from the years 1958-1959 by Stella, and blunt geometric arrangements of wooden beams, bricks, and steel tiles from the sixties by Andre. The room’s effect is definitive of high minimalism: enveloping and saturnine. It feels less like the beginning of something than like a funeral. Of course, most art movements are arguments that start with their conclusions. Think of analytical Cubism, and of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings: alphas that were also omegas, leaving subsequent artists to tease out implicit possibilities. Really big ideas in art, as in politics, transfix the culture until some new insight provides a way to see through and around them. I had hoped, apropos of the Guggenheim and MOCA shows, to announce that minimalism is at last firmly historical—over, that is, as the background model of what it means to address contemporary reality honestly and creatively on a public scale. No such luck. The Andre/Stella room, in Los Angeles, retains crushing authority. It is deathless, if only because, in order to die, a thing must first live. Minimalism forced all vitality out of art and into its surroundings, the sphere of a self-conscious, mythical being who has starred in art discourse all these years: “the spectator,” whom no one has ever met.

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We may never get past minimalism, in the sense of developing a new big idea of what art can and should do in the world. Minimalism nailed the spiritual vacuum at the core of secular society, and the deep-down forswearing of judgment—open-mindedness like a hole in the head—that preserves democracy. The movement’s peak revelation of meaning is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the lucky hit of an art student who was plainly influenced by Serra. It is about death, which erases all differences. It stirs grief, which is bottomless. It is like an Earth Mother gathering in her broken children. The memorial is also, by its existence, an advertisement of governmental institutions as bravely, profoundly responsible. There’s the rub of minimalism, which always endorses some or another faceless power. Minimalism ends where it begins, at the edge of a cliff. Any reaction against it can only be a turning-back.