You’re right that reading installation, performance from a minimalist trajectory is pretty linear and a gross generalisation but it is not quite so ‘modernist’ as you so put it to be. What about Surrealism and Dada?

We often forget how modern art history is divided by a caesura. This break was constituted by both a return to conservatism in art – the return to order in France, Neue Sachlichkeit, Russian Social realism, American realism followed so closely behind the first wave of avant-garde (surrealism, dada, constructivsm, etc.), and the tragic occurence of World War II which radically altered the cultural landscape of the West. Post war avant-garde could have drawn from pre-war precedence in terms of ideas and forms but by the sixties, they were working within a discursive system that prizes a rather conventionalised (by the sixties) Greenbergian notion of formalism and it was just as much a reaction to this newly minted ‘tradition’ that these disciplines (installation, earth, performance) gained popularity and accessibility amongst the dissatisfied.

I hope you don’t see this as a seni untuk seni discussion. The exploration of representational forms (and its development) and experience of art should not be misread as ‘art for art’, a term that has been much abused in this country. It is one of those terms that is redundantly bankrupt – mean so many different things to different people – that I like to see it banish from our vocabulary save its usage to describe a particular Parisian movement in the early part of the twentieth century.

Of all the modern art movements, Minimalism is probably one of the most misunderstood and scathingly dismissed a gigantic hoax. It’s a movement of ideas as much as aesthetics and I think that’s where the confusion lies for many people, especially audiences who aren’t up-to-speed on the history of modern art.

Installation, performance, earth art all bursting forth from the fountainhead of minimalism? Mmmm. Arguable. Very arguable. And a very modernist, linear way of thinking about the development of ideas. I’d say that throughout the history of art there have been attempts to bridge that gap between art and life. Surrealism? Dada? Those weren’t just chopped liver, wat.

I personally think Minimalism developed from the need to address specific aesthetic problems to do with the transition from painting to sculpture. Frank Stella and the Color Field painters like whats-his-face Rothko and that guy who made the black cross paintings were already a reaction to the sploshy, let-my-guts-out-on-the-canvas wank of abstract expresso coffee. But there was yet to be a reaction in sculpture terms.

Along with paint, abs-ex also vomited out the idea of art not just as an image, as you say, but theatre, a site where the act painting happens. You’re not looking at a painting as an expression of emotion or angst etc, but also as an object, a thing in space and time. Minimalism took that idea and pushed it to the absolute edge.

And etc. Seni untuk seni. Fascinating dinner conversation between art geeks, but that’s the limit of the potential of this kind of discussion… for me, that is. I’m not dismissing it entirely. Just saying… it’s a nice dessert, but I wouldn’t make it my meat and potatoes.

What helped me understand minimalism most are not actually texts written by proponents of this kind of art but its detractors. Archnemesis critic/historian in Art and Objecthood describes minimalism quite scathingly as ‘theatre’. This is a brilliant and succinct encapsulation of what the artwork is about. By de-emphasising the authorial mark or gesture of the artist in an artwork, minimalist art reacted against the traditional notion of art as a window into another world. Even in abstract expressionist works, one is privileged into the emotions of the artist. Instead by working with fundamental forms, it brings our attention to the ‘object’ness of the work of art which leads to the consideration of the space around it and us as viewers engaging with it. This reviled ‘theatre’ is the everyday, the realm of human action, the realisation of us, our space, our engagement that Fried is so afraid will impinge and pollute the autonomy of the aesthetic space in art which is pure and self-existing.

In turn, minimalism is really the movement that opens up art beyond the limiting ways we engage with art. Installation, performance, earth art, are all legacy of ‘minimalism’. This might not appear to seem so if we chart the development on a formal level. But think of the possibilities of what this notion of the ‘theatre’ brings in. The above mentioned practices could not have taken form if this initial impasse wasn’t redressed through minimalist practices.

Hmmm…. the Ikea reference is not about cheapening the quality of the work, which I think is powerful and thought provoking, and very important for viewers to see in KL. Along with the combination of the text.

It is about the fact that Art and Design dialogue. This then gets filtered down to the masses through popular culture. Meaning is then often mistranslated and ends up food for consumption. And so we then forget the original purpose which is fine/normal and good that many more people interact with threads and concepts but can also be a shame at times. It is more a comment on that then anything else and I think this is something we can’t ignore.

A Minimalist categorisation as a ‘lazy term’. Well perhaps and perhaps not. But then again categorisation is another inevitable thing. It is obviously limiting which I hate to contribute to as I want meaning to be open to multiple possibilities but it can also be useful as well. I want to talk to Fei more!!

E

With Simon Soon producing text for Fei’s latest show and Eva McGovern writing this review, seems fitting for me to complete this ARTERI trifecta with a response to the latter.

1.
I remember the first exhibition where I really learned to look. It was in the first year of art school. Our tutor brought us to see a show by Mladen Stilinovic, called ‘White is the Colour of Pain’. I didn’t know anything about art then – nothing about Minimalism, or Duchamp, or post-modernism, or installation. All I had was the ability to see. I saw funny little objects painted white – those whites had hues and textures that I’d never imagined.

There is something about art that makes you learn to look again, brings you back to your childhood when you could be fascinated by a square red box for hours. It’s an exciting, private, almost erotic, heightened experience.

I can still remember the creamy light of the gallery on that day, years ago.

There’s nothing ‘difficult’ and ‘academic’ about looking. Children can do it. They can spend whole afternoons doing it. That is why Fei’s exhibition is called ‘Paintings for All Ages’.

2.
These days there is a set formula for putting up exhibitions. You, the artist, makes the work. Then you think of a title for the exhibition and each piece. You write an artist statement that explains your work in words. And you invite someone (usually a curator, art critic or historian) to write an introductory essay in to be printed in the catalogue. Sometimes there will be text on the wall to help explain what is going on in your work.

Fei’s exhibition has no artist statement, wall text, curator’s essay, or catalogue. Instead, he has invited Simon Soon to write a series of personal responses to each work, these responses each fill up one sheet of A4 paper. They are stories, reflections and streams of thought. They don’t have any clear relationship to the artworks. They don’t use art jargon.

When I was young, they used to sell these paper stickers of geometric shapes in bright colors, which were basically like stamps – you had to lick the back to make them sticky. I really loved them. A red dot could be a planet, or the hole to hell (I was brought up with Taoist notion of very scary Buddhist hell). Blue triangles mixed with green was the sky crashing into earth because Atlas could no longer hold up the world on his shoulders.

I suggested to Fei that he should hold a workshop where people can choose how they will respond to his paintings, just like that invitation he extended to Simon Soon. I myself wanted to take the individually framed paintings off the wall and spend the whole day rearranging them into different configurations, different galaxies. That is why Fei’s show is called ‘Paintings with Extended Space’.

We’re offered an exhibition that isn’t propped up by the usual scaffolding that makes art ‘important’ and distant. As far I know, that’s a first in KL.

3.
The text is well written, the works are well executed. Together, they dance and sing to one another, but this can lock down meaning and give lazy viewers too much to think about it without the freedom to come to their own conclusions. Minimalism deals with universality, of the empowerment and amplification of form and colour without the hindering visual details of the natural world.

Minimalism.. it’s… I don’t know. In painting and sculpture terms, it’s a modern art movement that gained popularity in the Western world in the 1960s. It was perceived as a reaction to Abstract Expressionist painting like Jackson ‘Jack-the-Dripper’ Pollock’s. Donald Judd made plexiglass boxes. Carl Andre laid a row of white bricks on the floor. Dan Flavin made sculptures from fluorescent lights. Eva Hesse made Minimalism a little more human with her latex sculptures and humor.

Putting the Minimalist label so casually (lazily? – the cheap reference to IKEA aesthetic is especially hard to swallow) on Kwai Fei’s work is locking it down, in the same way Simon Soon’s text (or the idea, the possibility of his text) sets it free.