What were the basic ideas behind Minimal Art and Conceptual Art in the sixties?

Conceptual and Minimal Art were overlapping and connected twentieth century artistic movements which developed strongly in the 1960s, and which were characterised by a reaction against more traditional forms of representational art. The aims of both could perhaps be summarised by ‘non-perceptual and non-aesthetic’ since both conceptual and minimal art aimed to undermine the notion of the supremacy of the physicality of the art object as a given.
In this essay I will attempt to trace the background and artistic conditions which led to the particular development of these two movements in the sixties, as well as analysing the philosophy behind each movement as it was articulated in this period.
While particularly definable as a movement in the 1960s, the roots of Minimalism lay much further back in the history of art. Made possible by the various artistic phases of Modernism around the turn of the twentieth century, a continuum can be traced forwards from figurative and representational art into abstraction. Art historians such as Alfred H. Barr theorised the development of abstraction as a stage by stage process. After the post-Impressionist revolution instated by Cézanne, Cubism, described as ‘the parent of all modern abstract movements’ although remaining in essence representational, was developed by artists such as Picasso and was characterised in particular by multiple surfaces and viewpoints suggesting more the idea or perception of an object or scene rather than its literal representation. This philosophical move in art enabled subsequent generations of artists to revolutionise the role and purpose of visual art.
Russian responses to Cubism formed some of the roots of the American forms of Minimalism which characterised the movement in the sixties. As early as 1918 Kasimir Malevich painted White Square on a White Ground (c. 1918, New York, Museum of Modern Art), the seminal work in the movement he called ‘Suprematism’. Malevich considered Suprematism as a purer form of Cubism. In the Constructivism of Aleksandr Rodchenko, monochrome canvases did not represent a purified form of art but rather its philosophical annihilation: most famously in ‘The Death of Painting’ (c. 1921). Rodchenko stated, ‘I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it’s all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.’
Although elements of Minimalism can be identified in the work of geometrical abstract artists such as Piet Mondrian (such as 1939-42, Composition No. 10), Minimalist art did not begin to develop particularly strongly until the 1950s and 60s in America, in the context of a reaction against the dramatic emotion, drama and angst of Abstract Expressionism (as exemplified by the works of Wassily Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.) It is characterised particularly by extreme simplicity, the reduction of art to the absolute fundamentals. Frank Stella was one of the first painters to be described as a Minimalist and provided the unofficial slogan of the movement when he commented in 1966, ‘What you see is what you see.’ Deborah Solomon specifically locates Stella’s Minimalism as a reaction against Post-Impressionism: ‘His “Black Paintings”, which made him famous almost overnight, are like anti-van Goghs. Each consists of a big rectangle symmetrically subdivided into right-angled patterns of stripes, and nowhere in their mute surfaces will you find a reference to the human figure, bowls of fruit or sun-dappled harbors in France.’
Where Minimalism is conceived as a specific reaction to an overemotional artistic context, Conceptualism arose originally from a combination of artistic and societal forces in the nihilistic ‘Dada’ movement. The most influential Dadaist was Marcel Duchamp, whose ‘readymades’ in particular, real objects from everyday life presented as ‘art’, such as the now seminal urinal (1917, Fountain), constituted a fundamental challenge to the identity of the art object and the purpose and role of art itself.
Joseph Kosuth, one of the founders of Conceptual Art movement, attributed great significance to the influence of Duchamp: ‘The event that made conceivable the realization that it was possible to “speak another language” and still make sense in art was Marcel Duchamp’s first unassisted Readymade. With the unassisted Readymade, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said…This change – one from ‘appearance’ to ‘conception’ – was the beginning of ‘modern’ art and the beginning of conceptual art. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.’
One area in which the origins of Conceptual Art differ from those of Minimalism is that its roots were not only artistic but also socio-political. Like the Dadaist forerunners of Conceptual Art, who were partly responding to the catastrophe of the Great War and its aftermath, Kosuth emphasised the specificity of the nineteen sixties political context, calling Conceptual Art ‘the art of the Vietnam war era’. Art of the nineteen sixties shared with wider socio-cultural movements of the period a breakaway from tradition and authority whether in terms of ‘flower power’, feminism, popular music, sexuality, or radical politics. In this sense the Conceptual Art movement in its purest form differs from the way it was understood by Henry Flynt of the ‘Fluxus’ movement when he coined the term in 1963, in a sense more closely linked with the art object and of some of the concerns of Surrealism. Indeed Lucy Lippard specifically aligns ‘mainstream’ Conceptual Art with Minimalism, and with a specific period in the late sixties. A moment generally taken to define the movement is the exhibition in New York curated by Seth Siegelaub in 1969, including the artists Kosuth, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler and Lawrence Weiner. Advocating a text-based philosophy of art, Siegelaub argued that Conceptual Art moved so far away from traditional notions of the art object that the exhibition catalogue could constitute a primary artistic text, rather than, as in traditional catalogues, merely containing secondary representations of physical art objects which can exist only in the gallery space.
Mel Bochner agrees: ‘A doctrinaire Conceptualist viewpoint would say that the two relevant features of the “ideal Conceptual work” would be that it have an exact linguistic correlative, that is, it could be described and experienced in its description, and that it be infinitely repeatable. It must have absolutely no ‘aura’, no uniqueness to it whatsoever.’
The move made by Conceptualism which differentiates it from quintessential Minimalism is clear. It is specifically no longer question of producing an art object using paint or sculptural media, however subversive that artwork may be in taking representation to its limits. In Conceptual art, the conditions of artistic creation are completely destabilised along with the definition of what art itself is, and this is the main preoccupation of this and related movements. Artist Sol LeWitt summarised: ‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.’
Conceptual art, in its mainstream incarnations such as the ‘Art and Language’ group of which Joseph Kosuth was a member, notably moves away from the idea that art is an ‘expression’ of the artist him or herself. Such emotional and personal expression was particularly strongly characterised by the Abstract Expressionism movement, a reaction against the over-the-top expression of which had advanced the development of Minimalism. Some forms of Conceptual Art in the late fifties and early sixties did focus largely on the persona of the artist becoming the art object (such as the work of Yves Klein, including The Void, 1958). Mainstream Conceptual Art, on the other hand, objected to the investment of the artist’s personal feelings and emotions in the art object (in, for instance, the action painting of Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock). This ‘painterly’ approach was espoused by the famous formalist art critic Clement Greenberg, who saw Abstract Expressionism as a logical progression of the self-referentiality of Modernist painting. Conceptual Art was ideologically opposed to Greenberg’s formalist preoccupations focused on the nature of the artistic medium.
The problem, however, with citing Conceptual Art as a response or reaction arising from an other artistic movement is its very nature: Newman and Bird summarise, ‘Conceptual art is not just another particular kind of art, in the sense of a further specification of an existing genus, but an attempt at a fundamental redefinition of art as such, a transformation of it genus… Conceptual art was an attack on the art object as the site of a look.’ For Newman and Bird, the Conceptual Art movement of the sixties, along with Duchamp’s precedent (whose work, for these writers, was given retrospective legitimacy in the sixties as part of the ‘new’ movement) was an attempt to realign artistic practice as philosophical practice, and to reinstate the latter within cultural discourse. Ironically, what Conceptual Art claimed to do in its self-referentiality in the nature of art could be seen as being inscribed in a discourse initiated by Greenberg’s seminal interpretation of Modernist painting as being ‘about’ painting (self-referentiality itself being a philosophical concept from Kant).
A significant aspect of Conceptual Art in the sixties was its status as a non-commodity. As part of its position against the excesses of capitalism it was important that the work could not be ‘owned’ – Weiner said, ‘Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There’s no way I can climb inside somebody’s head and remove it.’ Artists such as Robert Barry, Yoko Ono, and Weiner produced texts that merely consisted of the instructions of how to make a work of art or instructions for ‘experiences’ or ‘events’.
After the sixties, the definition of what continued to be known as both Conceptual and Minimalist art shifted. PostMinimalism, in the work of artists such as Eva Hesse and more recently Anish Kapoor, drew on the ethics and intentions of Minimalism with very different agendas and results in their manipulation and diversification of surface, medium, form and texture. Conceptual art has continued to widen and diversify as a category away from the definitive form developed in the sixties. In particular, the move towards an even extreme commodification of the art object, such as in the ‘conceptual’ work of ‘Young British Artist’ Damien Hirst, almost always preoccupied by the art market and the value of the art object (such as his recent For The Love of God created in 2007). Hirst also experimented with the ideas of classical Minimalism (in, for instance, his ‘dot’ paintings) but with a consistent discourse of authorship and value.
Minimal and Conceptual Art arose in the sixties in a ‘pure’ form responding to the artistic, cultural, social or political context of the day. In their origins they both reacted against and stemmed from previous artistic movements and in many senses operated as a pivot point – a moment of revolution in art. The reverberations of this revolution continue today to put into question what constitutes ‘art’, concepts such as artistic progress and style, and the nature and role of the artistic establishment.